Facts and challenges in immunotherapy for t‐cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia

Abstract

T‐cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T‐ALL), a T‐cell malignant disease that mainly affects children, is still a medical challenge, especially for refractory patients for whom therapeutic options are scarce. Recent advances in immunotherapy for B‐cell malignancies based on increasingly efficacious monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and chimeric antigen receptors (CARs) have been encouraging for non‐responding or relapsing patients suffering from other aggressive cancers like T‐ALL. However, secondary life‐threatening T‐cell immunodeficiency due to shared expression of targeted antigens by healthy and malignant T cells is a main drawback of mAb—or CAR‐based immunotherapies for T‐ALL and other T‐cell malignancies. This review provides a comprehensive update on the different immunotherapeutic strategies that are being currently applied to T‐ALL. We highlight recent progress on the identification of new potential targets showing promising preclinical results and discuss current challenges and opportunities for developing novel safe and efficacious immunotherapies for T‐ALL.