Gene Therapy and Genomic Editing-Development of Adoptive T-cell Immunotherapy

For several decades, clinical scientists and physicians have been studying gene-modified T-cells to treat tumor patients, called T-cell based gene therapy. However, T-cell based gene therapy has efficacy questions and side-effects so that these techniques limited to the clinical application quickly. Therefore the possibility of creating cell-based gene therapy is just like a dream for tumor patients. With the recent development of CRISPR technology and genomic decoding, it is becoming increasingly possible to engineer cells by gene-modification for patients with tumor diseases. Gene-editing systems based on CRISPR, as well as transcription activatorlike effector nucleases (TALENs) and zinc-finger nucleases (ZFNs), are becoming valuable tools for the new generation tool of gene therapy. However, each of these systems to effectively apply for patients, including safe delivery and gene modification technologies, is still unknown. This chapter briefly introduces the history of gene therapy, the principle of gene editing with their non-viral and viral delivery methods. The chapter aims to discuss the latest developments in gene-editing technology and discuss their application to adoptive T cell immunotherapy.

Keywords: CRISPR/CAS9 (Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), Gene editing, Genetic modification, Gene therapy, Personalized immunotherapy, T-cell Adoptive immunotherapy, TIL (tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte), Transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), Zincfinger nucleases (ZFNs).