생화학분자생물학회

	Name: Hun Sik Kim ( hunkim@amc.seoul.kr )
	2010-present	Associate Professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Univ. of Ulsan College of Medicine, Korea
	2007-2010	Research Fellow, NIAID/NIH, USA
	2003-2007	Research Assistant Professor, Sungkyunkwan Univ. School of Med., Korea
	1996-2001	Ph.D., Department of Biological Sciences, KAIST, Korea

Harnessing NK cells for cancer immunotherapy: immune checkpoint receptors and chimeric antigen receptors

Natural killer (NK) cells are key antitumor effectors of the innate immune system that are endowed with a unique ability to spontaneously eliminate cells undergoing neoplastic transformation. Given their broad reactivity against diverse types of cancer and close association with cancer prognosis, NK cells have gained considerable attention as a promising therapeutic target for cancer immunotherapy. Currently, NK cell-based therapies demonstrate favorable clinical efficacies in several hematologic malignancies but limited success in solid tumors. This has highlighted the need to develop new therapeutic strategies to restore and optimize anti-tumor activity while preventing tumor immune escape. Among the therapeutic modalities with encouraging results so far in clinical trials are the blockade of immune checkpoint receptors to overcome the immune-evasion mechanism used by tumors and the incorporation of tumor-directed chimeric antigen receptors to enhance NK cell anti-tumor specificity and activity. These observations, with recent advances in the understanding of NK cell activation within tumor microenvironment, will facilitate the optimal design of NK cell-based therapy against a broad range of cancers and, more desirably, refractory cancers.


BMB Rep 2020 Dec 11;5187. Online ahead of print.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33298244/