Natural killer cell lines in tumor immunotherapy

Abstract

Natural killer (NK) cells are considered to be critical players in anticancer immunity. However, cancers are able to develop mechanisms to escape NK cell attack or to induce defective NK cells. Current NK cell-based cancer immunotherapy is aimed at overcoming NK cell paralysis through several potential approaches, including activating autologous NK cells, expanding allogeneic NK cells, usage of stable allogeneic NK cell lines and genetically modifying fresh NK cells or NK cell lines. The stable allogeneic NK cell line approach is more practical for quality-control and large-scale production. Additionally, genetically modifying NK cell lines by increasing their expression of cytokines and engineering chimeric tumor antigen receptors could improve their specificity and cytotoxicity. In this review, NK cells in tumor immunotherapy are discussed, and a list of therapeutic NK cell lines currently undergoing preclinical and clinical trials of several kinds of tumors are reviewed.

Keywords

natural killer cell / natural killer cell line / tumor immunotherapy / genetic modification

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Acknowledgements

Our research was supported by Important National Science and Technology Specific Projects (2009ZX09503-012, 2009ZX09102-222, 2012ZX10002-014), Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX1-YW-22), Ministry of Health Special Fund for Healthy Industry (200902002-2), Science Fund for Creative Research Groups of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31021061), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 81102221), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WK 2070000014).

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