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EBMT 2023 | Advances in gene engineering technologies for NK cell-based immunotherapy

Evelyn Ullrich, MD, PhD, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt, Germany, shares her excitement for novel technologies to engineer natural killer (NK) cells for immunotherapy, including CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing and Sleeping Beauty transposon technology. Prof. Ullrich also mentions the use of single-cell technologies to overcome the immunosuppressive pathways of NK cells, and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for personalizing therapy. This interview took place at the 49th Annual Meeting of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) held in Paris, France.

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Transcript (edited for clarity)

First of all, I want to give the statement that it’s really great to be in person at the EBMT annual meeting in Paris today, and the next days, and we missed that the last years where we couldn’t have in-person meetings due to several reasons. Now it’s absolutely fascinating how immune therapy improved during the last years and which tools we have for engineering immune cells. My team will present in several presentations, new technologies especially for the engineering of natural killer cells...

First of all, I want to give the statement that it’s really great to be in person at the EBMT annual meeting in Paris today, and the next days, and we missed that the last years where we couldn’t have in-person meetings due to several reasons. Now it’s absolutely fascinating how immune therapy improved during the last years and which tools we have for engineering immune cells. My team will present in several presentations, new technologies especially for the engineering of natural killer cells. Natural killer cells, in our opinion, have the advantage that they are a very safe product and can be generated as an off-the-shelf cell therapeutic and engineered to tackle the hard-to-treat cancer. So, with that, we have [a] toolbox to engineer natural killer cells using CRISPR, using Sleeping Beauty transposon technologies to insert CAR-T, but also to knock out immunosuppressive pathways. As you will see in one of the presentations, it helped a lot that we have also single cell technologies where we could unravel the underlying mechanisms to overcome immunosuppression on natural killer cells. I believe that now we stand at the beginning of a new wave of generating natural killer cells that can overcome hurdles. I believe that we can also use artificial intelligence to improve the design of cellular immunotherapeutics for personalized therapy of our patients.

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Disclosures

BMS: Honoraria; Phialogics: Honoraria.