Training the body's immune system to fight cancer has revolutionized personalized medicine.
One such approach — CAR-T therapy— takes a patient's own T-cells (a type of white blood cell) and genetically modifies them outside the body before they are returned to the patient. And it has been revolutionary for treating even the most aggressive types of lymphoma and leukemia. But some major challenges remain.
Before even reaching a tumor, CAR-T cells must survive the area that surrounds the tumor — packed with different molecules that can weaken or shutdown any sort of immune attacks.
Sometimes CAR-T cells simply cannot hold on long enough to completely eradicate cancer.
Now, researchers have found a way to help CAR-T cells circumvent these defenses.
"With our approach, we were able to roughly double the number of CAR-T cells that were still thriving and continued attacking the cancer in our lab experiments," said Charles Dimitroff, study author and professor in FIU's Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine.
Using an innovative technique known as glycoengineering, the team designed a surface 'shield' for the CAR-T cells, making them more resilient to the hostile tumor environment.
According to a preclinical study published in Frontiers in Immunology, these next-generation CAR-T cells outperformed standard CAR-T therapy — a promising pathway to more effective immunotherapies.
What you'll learn in this story
- CAR-T cell therapy takes a patient's own immune cells and turns them into cancer-killing machines.
- The problem: Long-term success of CAR-T cell therapy has been limited by the tumor microenvironment, which can suppress immune responses and reduce the therapy's effectiveness.
- FIU researchers have developed new, next generation CAR-T cells that last longer in this harsh environment — and fight cancer for a longer time, compared to standard CAR-T cells.
