2023-10-19 09:18:35
by Elena Meli
the objective of the research funded by the inventor of Facebook with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The new BioHub in New York is underway, which will be directed by the Italian Andrea Califano
Ten, fifteen years to meet the challenge and create cellular endoscopes capable of diagnosing, monitoring and treating tumors and also other diseases, exploiting the characteristics of specially modified immune cells. the goal of the newborn Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New Yorkwhich will be directed by the Italian Andrea Califano: director of the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University in New York and winner of the Knudson Award in Cancer Genetics of the National Cancer Institute in 2023, from today he will head a Center that brings together researchers from Columbia, Rockefeller and Yale universities to radically change the perspectives of medicine.
Memory to be awakened
The idea behind the research, which will be financed by Chan Zuckerberg Initiative by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, modify immune cells so that they become endoscopes capable of detecting diseases before they are recognizable with any other diagnostic method. Immune cells travel continuously in the body like sentinels to protect us from germs and more, some of them are memory cells left over from encounters with enemies in the past and are capable of mounting a defense very quickly: the goal of the researchers at Chan Zuckerberg Biohub New York exploit these characteristics, on the one hand unlocking the information contained in the molecular memory of immune cells, and on the other engineering them to provide them with new functions. The aim is to obtain molecular endoscopes capable of going into specific organs and recognizing the signals produced by diseased cells and tissues, then making them detectable with a blood sample or other methods.
Dream team
It seems like science fiction but it isn’t, because tumor immunotherapy already offers treatment scenarios that were unthinkable just ten years ago. And at work in the Biohub in New York (the fourth of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative after San Francisco, Chicago and Redwood City, dedicated to advanced imaging) is what Andrea Califano calls the dream team, because researchers and scientists from Columbia, Rockefeller and Yale University, who will all be able to work together around an idea that at the beginning also seemed like science fiction to us. Then we understood that, piece by piece, all the members of the three institutions that are part of the Biohub can share skills capable of leading us to achieve our scientific goals over the course of ten, fifteen years. We will begin to apply this type of approach for difficult-to-diagnose tumors such as ovarian or pancreatic cancer and for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s: the goal is to create immune cells that go to specific organs, can record and report information on the health status of those organs and can then be exploited to transport therapeutic molecules to you in the very early stages of a possible disease.
October 19, 2023 (modified October 19, 2023 | 09:18)
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
#Intelligent #immune #cells #prevent #diagnose #treat #tumors #time.news