Advances in Promoting the Efficacy of Chimeric Antigen Receptor T Cells in the Treatment of Hepatocellular Carcinoma

Abstract

HCC, one of the most common and deadly cancers worldwide, develops from hepatocytes and accounts for more than 90% of primary liver cancers. The current widely used treatment modalities are far from meeting the needs of liver cancer patients. CAR-T cell therapy, which has recently emerged, has shown promising efficacy in lymphoma and hematologic cancers, but there are still many challenges to overcome in its application to the clinical treatment of HCC, including osmotic barriers, the inhibition of hepatocellular carcinoma microenvironment activity, the limited survival and killing ability of CAR-T cells, and inevitable side effects, among others. As a result, a number of studies have begun to address the suboptimal efficacy of CAR-T cells in HCC, and many of these schemes hold good promise. This review focuses on advances in the past five years aimed at promoting the efficacy of CAR-T cell therapy for treatment of HCC.

Keywords

• CAR-T
• HCC
• treatment
• tumor microenvironment (TME)
• cytokines
• PD-1 (programmed cell death protein 1)/PD-L1 (programmed cell death ligand 1)