How Immune Cells Could be Undermining the Cancer-fighting Ability of Engineered Cell Therapies – MSKCC
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) shared a post on LinkedIn:
“A team led by Christopher A. Klebanoff, M.D., a physician-scientist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), has discovered that immune cells are the unexpected source of a protein called FAS-ligand (FAS-L), which has undermined the cancer-fighting ability of engineered cell therapies.
This new discovery, which was reported in Nature Cancer, sheds light on the tendency of these modified cells to lose power or even self-destruct before fully destroying a tumor.
Based on these findings, MSK researchers developed a genetic engineering technology to block the signal between FAS-L and FAS. They created a decoy receptor called FAS-DNR, which binds to FAS-L but does not trigger the self-destruction process. When this decoy receptor was added to human CAR-T and CAR-NK cells, the cells lasted longer and had more potency against tumors.
‘This allows us to fix the challenge of persistence with engineered cells before they are put back into the patient,’ Dr. Klebanoff says.“
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