Development of CAR T therapy for ALL-B using the point of care approach

Abstract

Introduction: The global cancer data released by the GLOBOCAN database showed 18.3 million new cases in 2018. About 440,000 of these cases correspond to leukemia, a cancer that urges for treatment modalities. Recently, CAR T-cell immunotherapy was approved for the treatment of acute B cell leukemias (B-ALL) and some lymphomas with promising results. However, the major drawbacks of CAR-T treatments are the high costs, being prohibitive for many of the patients. We developed an alternative low-cost approach to gene modify T cells to express CAR using the Sleeping Beauty (SB) system and electroporation. In addition, we show that it is not necessary to activate or expand T cells ex vivo when using this system, an aspect that renders this approach to a point-of-care (POC) strategy.