Paving the Way Towards Universal Chimeric Antigen Receptor Therapy in Cancer Treatment: Current Landscape and Progress

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy has been proved effective in a stream of clinical trials, especially in hematologic malignancies. However, current CAR therapy is highly personalized as cells used are derived from patients themselves, which can be costly, time-consuming, and sometimes fails to achieve optimal therapeutic results due to poor quality/quantity of patient-derived cells. On the contrary, universal CAR therapy, which is based on healthy individuals’ cells, circumvents several limitations of current autologous CAR therapy. To achieve the universality of CAR therapy, the allogeneic cell transplantation related issues, such as graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and host-versus-graft activities (HVGA), must be addressed. In this review, we focus on current progress regarding GVHD and HVGA in the universal CAR therapy, followed by a universal CAR design that may be applied to allogeneic cells and a summary of key clinical trials in this field. This review may provide valuable insights into the future design of universal CAR products.