Novel strategies of tumor immunotherapy based on the functional features of HLA-E / 中国肿瘤生物治疗杂志

ABSTRACT

@#Human leukocyte antigen-E (HLA-E) is highly expressed in many kinds of cancer and associated with the prognosis of patients in a cancer-type-dependent manner. HLA-E plays an important anti-tumor immunomodulatory role mainly by binding to activating receptor (NKG2C) or inhibitory receptor (NKG2A) on NK cells or T cells. Based on this, targeting HLA-E/NKG2A to block the interaction of HLA-E with NKG2A or inhibit HLA-E expression may be one of the promising strategies for augmenting anti-tumor immune response. Based on the functional features of HLA-E, developing enhanced or universal engineered-T/NK cells adoptive cellular immunotherapies has the potential of enhancing the therapeutic effects of adoptive cellular immunotherapies, with good prospects in research and clinical application. How to effectively combine the strategy of targeting HLA-E/NKG2A with other immune therapies for more precise immunotherapy and better clinical therapeutic effects remains one of the challenges in the research and application of anti-tumor immuotherapies.