Immunotherapy is an umbrella term used to describe a range of treatment options that modulate the immune system to combat disease. Immunotherapies that harness the power of the immune system to kill cancer cells have achieved remarkable clinical success and revolutionized cancer treatment. However, with small and educated modifications, many of these approaches can be adapted to instead dampen undesired immune responses, thus holding the potential to treat autoimmune diseases, transplant rejection, allergies, and other inflammatory disorders. For example, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) technology, which has been predominantly used to confer tumor antigen specificity to T cells, has now been applied to generate allo-specific regulatory T cells, currently in clinical trials.

This Research Topic aims to highlight immunotherapeutic strategies that were originally developed to treat cancer and have since been adapted and/or repurposed to treat autoimmune disorders, transplant rejection, allergies or other inflammatory disorders. We aim to discuss the progress made in adapting these approaches, the lessons learned from cancer immunotherapy, the caveats and pitfalls currently faced, and how the latter can be overcome to bring tolerance-inducing immunotherapies to the clinic.

This Research Topic invites the submission of Original Research and Review/mini-Review articles focusing on immunotherapeutic strategies that can be modified to treat autoimmune diseases, transplant rejection, and/or inflammatory disorders.

Examples of such treatment options are outlined below, although this is not an exhaustive list and articles related to similar therapeutic approaches are more than welcome.

– Cytokine immunotherapies and related strategies, including cytokine muteins, cytokine complexes, and orthogonal cytokine/receptor pairings

– Monoclonal antibody immunotherapies and related engineered derivatives, such as bispecific antibodies, antibody fragments, and antibody/drug conjugates

– Adoptive cell therapies, related cell isolation techniques, and/or genetic engineering techniques to enhance and/or manipulate the function of these cells e.g. using chimeric antigen receptors to confer specificity to regulatory T cells

Submit your idea

Impact

Frontiers in Immunology

Submit your idea

Impact