[2] US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved immune system modulators include anti-inflammatory and immunosuppressive agents, vaccines, therapeutic antibodies and Toll-like receptor (TLR) agonists.
[3] In 2016, John Lin head of Pfizer's San Francisco biotech unit stated, “the immune system will be the most convenient vehicle for [engineered human cells], because they can move and migrate and play such important roles.”[3] Advances in systems biology support high-dimensional quantitative analysis of immune responses.
Such strategies could produce organisms that perform multistep immune functions such as presenting antigen to and co-stimulating helper T cells in a specific manner, or providing integrated signals to B cells to induce affinity maturation and isotype switching during antibody production.
Such engineered organisms have the potential be as safe and as inexpensive as probiotics but precise in carrying out targeted interventions.
Provenge is an adoptive cell-transfer therapy in which a patient's antigen-presenting target autologous prostate cancer tissue.