Payload Delivery: Engineering Immune Cells to Disrupt the Tumour Microenvironment

SIMPLE SUMMARY: Cell-based therapies composed of genetically engineered immune cells have huge potential for treating cancer. T cells modified to express tumour-targeting receptors have been proven to be highly effective against blood cancers but not solid malignancies. Using innovative genetic modifications, we have the potential to enhance solid tumour targeting by cell-based therapies and fulfil this unmet clinical need. Different genetic engineering approaches have been proposed, each designed to overcome specific hurdles associated with solid tumours. In this review, we discuss the novel ways of engineering immune cells to enhance efficacy against solid tumours, and how this has led to a new era of cell-based therapies, capable of delivering immunotherapeutic payloads that disrupt the immunosuppressive tumour microenvironment and generate concerted anti-tumour immune responses. ABSTRACT: Although chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells have shown impressive clinical success against haematological malignancies such as B cell lymphoma and acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, their efficacy against non-haematological solid malignancies has been largely disappointing. Solid tumours pose many additional challenges for CAR T cells that have severely blunted their potency, including homing to the sites of disease, survival and persistence within the adverse conditions of the tumour microenvironment, and above all, the highly immunosuppressive nature of the tumour milieu. Gene engineering approaches for generating immune cells capable of overcoming these hurdles remain an unmet therapeutic need and ongoing area of research. Recent advances have involved gene constructs for membrane-bound and/or secretable proteins that provide added effector cell function over and above the benefits of classical CAR-mediated cytotoxicity, rendering immune cells not only as direct cytotoxic effectors against tumours, but also as vessels for payload delivery capable of both modulating the tumour microenvironment and orchestrating innate and adaptive anti-tumour immunity. We discuss here the novel concept of engineered immune cells as vessels for payload delivery into the tumour microenvironment, how these cells are better adapted to overcome the challenges faced in a solid tumour, and importantly, the novel gene engineering approaches required to deliver these more complex polycistronic gene constructs.