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Turbocharged CAR-T cells melt tumours in mice — using a trick from cancer cells

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2024-02-09 22:00:05

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A cancer cell (blue; artificially coloured) is targeted by an engineered immune cell (purple), which can be enhanced by mutations originally discovered in cancer cells. Credit: Steve Gschmeissner/Science Photo Library

Cancer cells are the ultimate survivors, riddled with mutations that let them thrive when healthy cells would die. These same mutations can boost the ability of game-changing cell therapies to quash cancer, a study in mice shows1.

Among these therapies are chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, which are already used to treat several types of blood cancer. The new study shows that engineered CAR T cells carrying a mutation that was first found in cancerous T cells can vanquish tumours that don’t respond to current CAR-T therapies.

“It’s a beautiful piece of work and opens the door for better CAR-T therapies in the future,” says Madeleine Duvic, a dermatologist and cancer researcher at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, who was not involved in the work.