Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in developed countries. Standard treatments such as chemotherapy and surgery can often be invasive or high risk to patients and, by themselves can result in subpar success rates. As an alternative treatment, immune cell therapies have shown promising results in recent clinical trials.

Chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) have demonstrated significantly enhanced anti-tumour activity when expressed in immune effector cells such as T cells. Additionally, CARs can be optimized for expression in natural killer (NK) cells which are responsible for innate immunity. In contrast to CAR-T cells, the NK CAR cells do not require human leukocyte antigen (HLA) matching and therefore do not need to be collected from a patient or donor. This would allow for NK CAR cell therapies to be standardized and widely applicable.

abm offers ten variants of NK CAR lentiviruses which can be used to create NK CAR expressing NK cells. These cells target mesothelin – an antigen which is highly expressed on tumours commonly observed in ovarian, lung and pancreatic cancers.