Current application and future perspective of CRISPR/cas9 gene editing system mediated immune checkpoint for liver cancer treatment

Abstract

Liver cancer, which is well-known to us as one of human most prevalent malignancies across the globe, poses a significant risk to live condition and life safety of individuals in every region of the planet. It has been shown that immune checkpoint treatment may enhance survival benefits and make a significant contribution to patient prognosis, which makes it a promising and popular therapeutic option for treating liver cancer at the current time. However, there are only a very few numbers of patients who can benefit from the treatment and there also exist adverse events such as toxic effects and so on, which is still required further research and discussion. Fortunately, the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat/CRISPR-associated nuclease 9 (CRISPR/Cas9) provides a potential strategy for immunotherapy and immune checkpoint therapy of liver cancer. In this review, we focus on elucidating the fundamentals of the recently developed CRISPR/Cas9 technology as well as the present-day landscape of immune checkpoint treatment which pertains to liver cancer. What’s more, we aim to explore the molecular mechanism of immune checkpoint treatment in liver cancer based on CRISPR/Cas9 technology. At last, its encouraging and powerful potential in the future application of the clinic is discussed, along with the issues that already exist and the difficulties that must be overcome. To sum it all up, our ultimate goal is to create a fresh knowledge that we can utilize this new CRISPR/Cas9 technology for the current popular immune checkpoint therapy to overcome the treatment issues of liver cancer.