CD7

Class

Autologous CAR-T cell therapy

Pathway

CAR-mediated T-cell cytotoxicity against CD7-positive AML blasts, used both as standalone therapy and as a bridge to allogeneic HSCT

CD7 is a cell-surface glycoprotein expressed on most T lymphocytes, natural killer (NK) cells, and, importantly, on the malignant blasts of many cases of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Because CD7 is present on a large fraction of leukemic cells but has limited expression on other tissues, it is an attractive surface marker for chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, in which a patient's own T cells are engineered to express a synthetic receptor that recognizes CD7 and triggers direct killing of CD7-positive cells. The biological rationale is to harness the potent, antigen-specific cytotoxicity of engineered T cells against a leukemia that has proven difficult to eradicate with chemotherapy alone. Because CD7 is also found on normal T and NK cells, this approach depletes these populations along with the leukemia, which is why such therapies are often used as a bridge to allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), allowing a donor immune system to reconstitute normal blood and immune function after the CAR-T cells have reduced the disease burden. This mechanism broadly matters in relapsed or refractory hematologic malignancies where few other targeted options exist.