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SITC 2021 | Using NK cells to treat cancer

Jeffrey S. Miller, MD, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, discusses how natural killer (NK) cell products can be used to treat cancer. Specifically highlighted are the reductions in graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), cytokine release syndrome (CRS), and neurotoxicity expected with NK-cell therapy. This interview took place during the 36th Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Transcript (edited for clarity)

I’ve obviously been working in this space for the past two decades. I think we’ve established proof of principle with NK cell therapy, but I think what is going on now is that there’s many flavors. My colleague, Katy Rezvani, who is talking this afternoon as well, I think, was the first in the New England Journal of Medicine paper to put anti-CAR19 into an NK cell product. If you look at the industry involvement in the NK cell field, it’s just kind of exploding right now...

I’ve obviously been working in this space for the past two decades. I think we’ve established proof of principle with NK cell therapy, but I think what is going on now is that there’s many flavors. My colleague, Katy Rezvani, who is talking this afternoon as well, I think, was the first in the New England Journal of Medicine paper to put anti-CAR19 into an NK cell product. If you look at the industry involvement in the NK cell field, it’s just kind of exploding right now. The last time I counted, there were somewhere between a dozen to 20 NK cell companies with various flavors, whether they be IPS-derived, umbilical cord blood-derived, peripheral blood-derived, NK cell lines.

And I think now that we could do gene modifications with safety, it’s really opened up a whole new field. The T-cell field has been very, probably, about five years more advanced than the NK cell field. I think, as I talk about NK cells a lot, the challenge I think to the NK cell industry is to try to have something commercialized in the next three to five years. The main selling point about NK cells is they’re easier to manufacture as an off-the-shelf product, and they don’t have graft versus host disease. In all the literature published so far, they should have a lower propensity to give cytokine release syndrome and neurotoxicity.

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