Current and Future Development of T Cell Receptor-Engineered T Cell Therapy

Immunotherapy has brought us new opportunities and hopes in cancer treatment, including immune checkpoint inhibitors, therapeutic antibodies, cancer vaccines, immune modulators and adoptive cell therapies, which have significantly improved prognosis of tumor patients and long-term survival of some advanced malignant tumor patients. T cell receptor-engineered T cell(TCR-T) therapy is a type of therapy that transforms T cell receptor(TCR)-recognizing tumor antigens into the patient,s peripheral T cells to produce T cells which can specifically recognize tumor antigens, with such genetically engineered T cells being then injected back into the patient. Due to the natural TCR signaling, better therapeutic efficacy, lower toxic or side effects and more options of targeting antigens, TCR-T therapy is believed to have a wide range of application. At present, a number of clinical studies on TCR-T therapy are underway, and the existing results show that TCR-T has a good therapeutic effect, though some problems such as side effects still remain to be addressed. This review focuses on the clinical research progress, current challenges and future development of TCR-T therapy.