Programmable CAR and antigen pairing for solid tumor immunotherapy

In our recent publication in Nature Communications, “Engineering programmable CAR and antigen pairing via drug-gated light activation,” we developed a modular CAR-T platform designed to address two central barriers in solid-tumor immunotherapy: antigen escape and on-target/off-tumor toxicity.1 While CAR-T therapies have achieved remarkable success in hematologic malignancies, their efficacy in solid tumors remains limited by heterogeneous antigen expression, dynamic antigen loss, and the difficulty of identifying targets that are both broadly expressed on tumors and absent from normal tissues.