Chemoenzymatic glycan editing for boosting the efficacy of cell-based cancer immunotherapy

Cancers, such as breast and colon cancer, are chronical diseases that affect millions of people worldwide. Adoptive cell transfer-based therapies have received lots of attention in recent years for treating various types of cancers. Kymriah, a chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T) therapy that was approved recently as the first cell-based gene therapy in the United States, is a preeminent example. However, in the tumor microenvironment has evolved numerous strategies to downregulate the cytotoxicity of the transferred T cells. In this talk, I will describe a strategy that is based on chemoenzymatic editing of cell-surface glycans to boost the efficacy of cell-based immunotherapy.