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Publication date: March 2016
Source:Trends in Pharmacological Sciences, Volume 37, Issue 3
Author(s): Daniel T. Harris, David M. Kranz
The tumor-killing properties of T cells provide tremendous opportunities to treat cancer. Adoptive T cell therapies have begun to harness this potential by endowing a functionally diverse repertoire of T cells with genetically modified, tumor-specific recognition receptors. Normally, this antigen recognition function is mediated by an αβ T cell receptor (TCR), but the dominant therapeutic forms currently in development are synthetic constructs called chimeric antigen receptors (CARs). While CAR-based adoptive cell therapies are already showing great promise, their basic mechanistic properties have been studied in less detail compared with those of αβ TCRs. In this review, we compare and contrast various features of TCRs versus CARs, with a goal of highlighting issues that need to be addressed to fully exploit the therapeutic potential of both.

Today, I asked my mom about signing up for an online dating site. She took one look at me and said, "Why get rejected online when you can just go outside for the same?" FML

Human reasoning combines inferential and creative processes. [Also see Perspective by Hare] Authors: Maël Donoso, Anne G. E. Collins, Etienne Koechlin

The J6JFH1 Strain of Hepatitis C Virus Infects Human B-Cells with Low Replication Efficacy.

Viral Immunol. 2014 May 22;

Authors: Nakai M, Seya T, Matsumoto M, Shimotohno K, Sakamoto N, Aly HH

Abstract
Abstract Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a serious health problem worldwide that can lead to hepatocellular carcinoma or end-stage liver disease. Current treatment with pegylated interferon, ribavirin, and NS3/4A protease inhibitor would lead to a good prognosis in a large population of patients, but there is still no effective vaccine for HCV. HCV robustly infects hepatocytes in the liver. However, extrahepatic manifestations such as mixed cryoglobulinemia, a systemic immune complex-mediated disorder characterized by B-cell proliferation, which may evolve into overt B-cell non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, have been demonstrated. HCV-RNA is often found to be associated with peripheral blood lymphocytes, suggesting a possible interaction with peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs), especially B-cells with HCV. B-cell HCV infection was a matter of debate for a long time, and the new advance in HCV in vitro infectious systems suggest that exosome can transmit HCV genome to support "infection." We aimed to clarify the susceptibility of primary B-cells to HCV infection, and to study its functional effect. In this article, we found that the recombinant HCV J6JFH1 strain could infect human B-cells isolated from the peripheral blood of normal volunteers by the detection of both HCV-negative-strand RNA by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, and NS5A protein. We also show the blocking of HCV replication by type I interferon after B-cell HCV infection. Although HCV replication in B-lymphocytes showed lower efficiency, in comparison with hepatocyte line (Huh7) cells, our results clearly demonstrate that human B-lymphocytes without other non-B-cells can actually be infected with HCV, and that this interaction leads to the induction of B-cells' innate immune response, and change the response of these cells to apoptosis.

PMID: 24853207 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]