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Originally published by Meg Wingerter, The Denver Post, on March 14, 2024             Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain A process of taking patients' own cells and reprogramming them to fight cancer has been a last-ditch option for blood cancer patients when nothing else worked, but a new study underway in Aurora is trying to determine whether more patients could benefit from trying the procedure sooner. Chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy , known as CAR-T , is a type of immunotherapy that involves taking cells from the patient's body and altering them to attack cancerous cells that have specific proteins on their surfaces. The patient ...

  Originally published by Northwestern University, on February 7, 2024     Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Scientists at the UC San Francisco (UCSF) and Northwestern Medicine may have found a way around the limitations of engineered T cells by borrowing a few tricks from cancer itself. By studying mutations in malignant T cells that cause lymphoma , they zeroed in on one that imparted exceptional potency to engineered T cells . Inserting a gene encoding this unique mutation into normal human T cells made them more than 100 times more potent at killing cancer cells without any signs of becoming toxic . The study appears in Nature . While current immunotherapies work only against cancers of the blood and bone marrow, the T cells engineered by Northwestern and UCSF were able to kill tumors derived from skin, lung and stomach in mice . The team has already begun working toward testing this new approach in people. "We used nature's roadmap to make better T ...

Originally published by Delthia Ricks , Medical Xpress, on December 28, 2023 P resence of Tcf7+ CD8+ T cells during the primary response to infection. (A) Experimental schematic: Naïve P14 cells (CD45.2) were transferred into congenically distinct B6 mice (CD45.1) that were subsequently infected with LCMV (Arm or WE strain). On the indicated day of infection, P14 cells present in the spleen (unless indicated otherwise) were characterized using flow cytometry. (B) Live cells were gated using FSC-A and SSC.A, followed by doublet discrimination using FSC-H/FSC-A. Next, singlets were gated for alive cells, CD8+ and congenic markers CD45.1 and CD45.2 were used to gate P14 cells. Credit: Science Immunology (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciimmunol.adh3113 One of the more rigorous debates in immunology has centered on the origin of an enigmatic T cell population that possesses properties imparting memory and stem cell–like qualities, but facts about their genesis were so elusive that debate h...