One way to overcome this issue is to ramp up a patient’s immune system across the board to compensate for the suppression around the tumor. But this army struggles to tackle solid cancers, says Wendell Lim, a University of California, San Francisco cell and molecular biologist and a coauthor of one of the studies, because the environment around the tumor is immunosuppressive and blocks CARs, keeping the engineered cells from spotting their target.
CARs are engineered into a patient’s own T cells, thereby providing the patient’s immune system with an army of cells ready to go after any cancerous cells they find. “We’re building a new immune response.” Controlling where: Engineering a one-stop shop for targeting tumorsĬhimeric antigen receptors (CARs) are synthetic proteins modeled on normal T cell receptors but are designed to home in on tumors. “We’re really seeing an acceleration of what can be done,” he adds.
With these new techniques, scientists will be able to activate and shut off CAR T cells, and “have them do what we want,” he says. Grégoire Altan-Bonnet, a systems immunologist at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who coauthored a perspective on both studies in Science but was not involved in either, notes that doctors currently inject T cells into patients with the hopes that patients will respond to the treatment. The new techniques allow them to control when and where CAR T cells are active, targeting tumors at specific times and keep CAR T cells from becoming less effective over time, which often happens during cancer. The researchers behind the works say that, thanks to the new approaches, they may be able to overcome the current hurdles facing CAR T therapies. However, as successful as they are in treating some cancers, they fail at treating others, such as pancreatic tumors, which develop clever ways of avoiding immune detection.īut such failures may soon be a thing of the past: In two new mouse studies published in Science on December 15, researchers unveiled tactics for creating manipulatable CAR T cells. Chimeric antigen receptor T cells, better known as CAR T cells, are powerful immunotherapy agents derived from a cancer patient’s existing immune cells and engineered to fight their specific tumors.
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