Another T-Cell Advance Against Cancer

The technique of using engineered T cells against cancerous cells may be about to explode ever more than it has already. One of the hardest parts of getting this process scaled up has been the need to extract each patient's own T cells and reprogram them. But in a new report in Nature Biotechnology, a team at Sloan-Kettering shows that they can raise cells of this type from stem cells, which were themselves derived from T lymphocytes from another healthy donor. As The Scientist puts it: Sadelain’s team isolated T cells from the peripheral blood of a healthy female donor and reprogrammed them into stem cells. The researchers then used disabled retroviruses to transfer to the stem cells the gene that codes for a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) for the antigen CD19, a protein expressed by a different type of immune cell—B cells—that can turn malignant in some types of cancer, such as leukemia. The receptor for CD19 allows the T cells to track down and kill the rogue B cells. Finally, the researchers induced the CAR-modified stem cells to re-acquire many of their original T cell properties, and then replicated the cells 1,000-fold. “By combining the CAR technology with the iPS technology, we can make T cells that recognize X, Y, or Z,” said Sadelain. “There’s flexibility here for redirecting their specificity towards anything that you want.” You'll note the qualifications in that extract. The cells that are produced in this manner aren't quite the same as the o...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Cancer Source Type: blogs