Background: Anthrax is a particularly dangerous infectious disease that affects humans and livestock. Efficacious vaccines that can rapidly induce a long-term immune response are required to prevent anthrax infection in humans. Domains 4 and 1 of the protective antigen (PA) and lethal factor (LF), respectively, have very high antigenic properties. Aims: In this...

Surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy have been the foundation of cancer treatment. Advances in the field of immunology (a branch of science that studies all aspects of the immune system) have led to a greater understanding of the ways in which the body’s own defenses can be used for treatment of blood cancers. Cancer researchers are now studying how the immune system can help destroy ca...

In recent years, the chimeric antigen receptor modified T cells (Chimeric antigen receptor T cells, CAR-T) immunotherapy has developed rapidly, which has been considered the most promising therapy. Efforts to enhance the efficacy of CAR-based anti-tumor therapy have been made, such as the improvement of structures of CAR-T cells, including the development of extracellular antigen recognition re...

In the hydrodynamic injection (HI) BALB/c mouse model with the overlength viral genome, we have found that woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV) could persist for a prolonged period of time (up to 45 weeks), while hepatitis B virus (HBV) was mostly cleared at week four. In this study, we constructed a series of chimeric genomes based on HBV and WHV, in which the individual sequences of a 1.3-fold ove...

Chimeric antigen receptor T cells redirected to CD19 (chimeric antigen receptor [CAR19]) show great promise in the clinic to treat refractory CD19+ acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). However, production of autologous CAR19 cells from these patients can be difficult as patients frequently have T-cell dysfunction, due to disease and/or treatment-related effects. In this issue of Blood, Jacoby et...

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) modified T cells have emerged as powerful tools for controlling leukemias. We recently showed that anti-CD123 CAR-expressing cytokine-induced killer T cell treatment is an effective immunotherapeutic approach to eradicate Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) cells. Here, we discuss how this genetically modified cell-based strategy could be relevant to the field of AML th...

Improved outcomes for patients with cancer hinge on the development of new targeted therapies with acceptable short-term and long-term toxicity. Progress in basic, preclinical, and clinical arenas spanning cellular immunology, synthetic biology, and cell-processing technologies has paved the way for clinical applications of chimeric antigen receptor-based therapies. This new form of targeted im...

Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) possess fixed specificity for a single antigen and require empirical testing in T cells. To address this, we have developed a novel, adaptable immune receptor strategy that allows for the rapid generation and testing of T cells of nearly infinite antigen specificity.