Combined CAR T-cell Therapies: A Next Step towards Precision Oncology

Dear Colleagues,

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is a rapidly growing field with unparalleled clinical success rates for the treatment of patients with relapsed or refractory B cell malignancies. However, translation toward other tumor entities is still limited as CAR T-cells alone might not be sufficient to elicit durable responses. Reasons are multifaceted and include, e.g., the lack of true tumor-specific markers, the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment, tumor heterogeneity, and the selection and induction of therapy-resistant tumor cell clones or previous treatment modalities. To overcome these hurdles and to boost CAR T-cell cytotoxicity, various combinatorial or multiple tumor targeting approaches are intensively investigated, but combinations with other treatment modalities, such as standard chemo- or radiotherapy, small molecule inhibitors or targeted therapies, also play an increasingly important role. From a clinical perspective, even the combination of CAR T-cell therapy with non-invasive, molecular imaging is a highly promising strategy for improved patient stratification and guidance of appropriate patient-specific treatment. The implementation of imaging tools will allow both target verification to periodically assess molecular responses and capture the dynamic behavior of living drug therapies. This may facilitate accurate diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning, including interventions and dose calculations.

This Special Issue aims to cover recent advances in combined CAR T-cell approaches as well as new imaging methods and therefore seeks for review or original manuscripts addressing one of the aforementioned (or related) topics.

Dr. Claudia Arndt
Guest Editor

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