Engineering time-controlled immunotherapy

Description Designer lymphocytes expand the dynamic range of possibilities for treating disease Immunotherapy harnesses the immune response to treat diseases, from cancers to autoimmune disorders. The boundaries of clinical immunotherapy for cancer have been pushed by the development of cancer-killing T cells that target tumors, therapies that block immune checkpoints to rearm cytotoxic T cells, and the optimization of engineered chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells (1). But there remain limitations when immune functions that have evolved to clear fast-invading pathogens are repurposed to eradicate slow-growing tumors. On pages 1186 and 1227 of this issue, Allen et al. (2) and Li et al. (3), respectively, present synthetic biology-based strategies to further improve cancer immunotherapies. Rather than being limited by “natural” immunology (using leukocytes, antibodies, and cytokines), these studies expand the scope of immune responses elicited by CAR T cells against diseased tissues.