Engineering T cells to destroy cancer cells has shown success in treating some types of cancer, such as leukemia and lymphoma. However, it hasn’t worked as well for solid tumors.
Engineering T cells to destroy cancer cells has shown success in treating some types of cancer, such as leukemia and lymphoma. However, it hasn’t worked as well for solid tumors.
One reason for this lack of success is that the T cells target only one antigen (a target protein found on the tumors); if some of the tumor cells don’t express that antigen, they can escape the T cell attack.
MIT researchers have now found a way to overcome that obstacle, using a vaccine that boosts the response of engineered T cells, known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, and also helps the immune system generate new T cells that target other tumor antigens. In studies in mice, the researchers found that this approach made it much more likely that tumors could be eradicated.
“This vaccine boosting appears to drive a process called antigen spreading, wherein your own immune system collaborates with engineered CAR T cells to reject tumors in which not all of the cells express the antigen targeted by the CAR T cells,” says Darrell Irvine, the Underwood-Prescott Professor with appointments in MIT’s departments of Biological Engineering and of Materials Science and Engineering, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
