Leveraging properties of Natural Killer cells for cell-based immunotherapy

Pharmaceutical Sciences provide an expanding array of novel drugs against various diseases but there are many medical conditions like cancer, heart diseases, genetic disorders etc. that remain still incurable. To alleviate all these fatal conditions researchers continued their efforts in search of cutting-edge technologies in the field of Biotechnology as well as Regenerative medicine. In nineteenth century, the knowledge of immunology led the scientists to a promising approach for immunotherapy named as Cell Based therapy or Cytotherapy wherein the viable, healthy and normal or engineered cells from self or donor person are injected or transplanted to the patient in order to make the illness less severe by facilitating the cells to exert therapeutic action (1). Cell based therapy uses vast types of cells for the treatment which are mainly stem cells, dendritic cells, lymphocytes, pancreatic cells etc. Out of these haematopoietic stem cell (HSC) based therapy is already a well-established treatment for blood related disorders whereas rest of the cells used are still in experimental phases (2). On the other hand, in recent years Autologous chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is the first commercialized therapy which led to substantial breakthrough in patients with critical B cell malignancies. However, despite the success, an obstacle remains which is nothing but graft Vs host disease. Natural killer (NK) cells, furthermore, identify their targets in a human leukocyte antigen (HLA)-unrestricted manner and hence do not represent these same concern which makes them suitable components for cell-based immunotherapy (3). This article mainly focuses on the properties and mechanism of NK cells for immunotherapy against various diseases along with associated challenges and recent advances to improve the effectivness of NK cell-based therapy.