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. 2024 Nov 8;9:302. doi: 10.1038/s41392-024-02005-w

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

Historical narrative of important milestones in NK cell research. Interrogation of the historical record of natural killer cell research from PubMed using the keywords “Natural Killer cells”, “Natural Killer cells and Immunotherapy”, “Natural Killer cells and CAR-NK”, and “Natural Killer cells and Covid”. We provide in the main text of the review a year-by-year narrative of the progress/discovery culminating in the offering of CAR-NK as an “experimental therapy” against cancer at MD Anderson cancer center. In 2021, the number of publications related to “NK cells” is 3.57-fold less than “T-Cells” and the research record of “CAR-NK” is even more minuscule. Both fields show a subsequent slump in research publications in the period 2020–2023 which may be due to the Covid-19 pandemic