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Engineering Anti-Tumor T Cell Immunity

Arvind Chhabra

T cell immunity is critical for protection against infectious agents as well as cancer. T cell immune response is a well orchestrated process that involves three key components. CD8+ T cells that harbor cytolytic machinery and can target and kill the tumor cells in an antigen specific manner, CD4+ T cells that can either “help” the generation of a productive CD8+ T cell or “regulate/suppress” it, and the Antigen Presenting Cells (APC) that can efficiently process the antigens and present them to the effector T cells in small fragments, termed as the antigenic epitopes. The specificity and efficacy of T cell immune response is evident by the remarkable success of vaccines against infectious agents. However, attempts to develop similar approaches against cancer have not resulted in similar success. The main reason for this is the fact that, most human cancers arise from within and self-reactive immune repertoire is eliminated during developmental process to prevent autoimmunity.