GoKawiil
Tech News
Researchers report that a young boy's cancer went into remission after receiving an experimental form of CAR T cell therapy. The treatment is part of ongoing efforts to adapt CAR T technology, previously effective mainly against blood cancers, to target solid tumors.
A young boy with hepatoblastoma that had spread to his lungs and stopped responding to chemotherapy achieved complete remission after receiving an experimental CAR-T cell treatment. The therapy, part of the CARE study, engineered the patient's own immune cells to target glypican-3, a protein found on liver cancer cells, while also boosting the cells' potency with two added immune signaling proteins. Twelve months after treatment, doctors report no detectable trace of the cancer.
University of Adelaide scientists led by Chunxia Zhao designed 'smart' nanoparticles that ferry mRNA specifically to tumor-associated macrophages, prompting them to produce CXCL9, a molecule that summons T cells to attack cancer. The approach, described this week in Science Advances, aims to reverse how tumors normally hijack macrophages to block immune attacks.
MIT scientists created a new vaccine adjuvant made of mRNA encoding two genes that push immune cells into a more active state via specific signaling pathways. Delivered in lipid nanoparticles in mouse models of bladder, colon, lung and skin cancers, the adjuvant slowed or eliminated tumors even without a cancer-specific vaccine, and worked even better alongside one or with checkpoint inhibitor drugs.