Emerging Immunotherapies against Novel Molecular Targets in Breast Cancer

• Main Authors: Vignesh Sivaganesh, Nazifa Promi, Salma Maher, Bela Peethambaran
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-02-01
• Series: International Journal of Molecular Sciences
• Subjects: immunotherapy; breast cancer; CAR-T; bispecific antibodies; mRNA vaccine; TNBC
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/5/2433

Immunotherapy is a highly emerging form of breast cancer therapy that enables clinicians to target cancers with specific receptor expression profiles. Two popular immunotherapeutic approaches involve chimeric antigen receptor-T cells (CAR-T) and bispecific antibodies (BsAb). Briefly mentioned in this review as well is the mRNA vaccine technology recently popularized by the COVID-19 vaccine. These forms of immunotherapy can highly select for the tumor target of interest to generate specific tumor lysis. Along with improvements in CAR-T, bispecific antibody engineering, and therapeutic administration, much research has been done on novel molecular targets that can especially be useful for triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) immunotherapy. Combining emerging immunotherapeutics with tumor marker discovery sets the stage for highly targeted immunotherapy to be the future of cancer treatments. This review highlights the principles of CAR-T and BsAb therapy, improvements in CAR and BsAb engineering, and recently identified human breast cancer markers in the context of in vitro or in vivo CAR-T or BsAb treatment.