Combination and integration to redirect NK cells for cancer immunotherapy

Cancer is a disease with still a high mortality. The number of new cases is still increasing globally despite current treatments. Therefore, new therapies with high specificity and efficiency to control the progress of cancer are urgently needed in the clinic. Nowadays, new cancer treatments emerged that are based on the immune system that have achieved encouraging outcomes. Together these modalities are called tumour immunotherapy. In this current PhD thesis, we have continued our group’s previous research on developing novel approaches for cancer immunotherapies are based on natural killer (NK) cells. This research demonstrated multiple methods to enhance the anti-tumour capacities of NK cells: 1) a combination with an anti-tumour antibody, 2) introduced an activation chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), 3) CRISPR/Cas9 genetic deletion of an inhibitory signal. These NK cell combinatorial approaches are ready for scale-up to be implemented into clinical treatments to the ultimate benefit of patients.