2024-10-24 09:15:00
Immunotherapies, which mobilize the patient’s immune system against what doctors want to attack, have become a very valuable resource in fighting cancer. These therapies, including CAR T cells, have worked well against cancers such as leukemias and lymphomas, but results have been less encouraging in solid tumors.
A team including Jiaxing Chen and Nikolay Dokholyan, both from the Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine in the US, has engineered immune cells so that they can penetrate solid tumors and kill tumor cells. And it works, at least against those grown in the laboratory.
Chen and his colleagues created a light-activated switch that controls the function of proteins associated with cell structure and shape and incorporated it into natural killer cells, a type of immune cell that fights infections and tumors.
When these modified immune cells receive blue light, they transform and can migrate into three-dimensional tumors grown in the laboratory and kill cancer cells.
The researchers tested the engineered natural killer immune cells against two types of solid tumors, one created with human breast cancer cells and another with human cervical cancer cells. Within seven days they killed the cancer cells.
Instead, natural killer cells that had not been reengineered attacked the tumor spheroid from the outside, but failed to penetrate the tumor. The result was that the tumor continued to grow.
They also modified mouse immune cells and successfully tested them against tumors grown from mouse melanoma cells.
Artistic recreation of a cancer cell (left) and an immune cell modified and activated by blue light (right). (Illustration: Amazings/NCYT)
This new approach could improve cell-based immunotherapies. However, although the results obtained so far in this line of research and development are very encouraging, the work is still in the preliminary stages and further research is needed to evaluate this technology for its possible therapeutic use, as Dokholyan warns.
Chen, Dokholyan and their colleagues present the technical details of their potential new treatment in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), under the title “Optogenetically engineered Septin-7 enhances immune cell infiltration of tumor spheroids.” (Fountain: NCYT by Amazings)
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