This vaccine, which carries the same antigen targeted by the CAR-T cells, is taken up by immune cells in the lymph nodes, where the CAR-T cells are exposed to it. In a 2019 study, Irvine and his colleagues enhanced CAR-T cells’ effectiveness against glioblastoma by delivering a vaccine to mice shortly after the engineered T cells were administered. However, not all glioblastoma cells express this antigen, and when attacked by CAR-T cells, some glioblastoma cells respond by halting production of the target antigen. To try to adapt this kind of treatment to glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, researchers have designed CAR-T cells that target a mutated version of the EGFR receptor. These treatments are based on CAR-T cells, which are engineered to display receptors that can recognize a specific antigen found on cancer cells. Food and Drug Administration has approved several types of T cell treatments for blood cancers. The lead author of the paper is Leyuan Ma, a former postdoc at the Koch Institute and currently an assistant professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Irvine is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Cell. “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. In studies in mice, the researchers found that this approach made it much more likely that tumors could be eradicated. 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. 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. 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |