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Hung Trinh: Researchers have re-engineered immune cells that penetrate and kill solid tumors

Hung Trinh/LinkedIn

Jan 8, 2025, 12:34

Hung Trinh: Researchers have re-engineered immune cells that penetrate and kill solid tumors

Hung Trinh, Senior Director of Business Development at OBiO Tech, shared a post on LinkedIn:

” ‘Re-engineered, blue light-activated immune cells penetrate and kill solid tumors‘

Penn State University: Hershey, Pa. – Immunotherapies that mobilize a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer have become a treatment pillar. These therapies, including CAR T-cell therapy, have performed well in cancers like leukemias and lymphomas, but the results have been less promising in solid tumors.

A team led by researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine has re-engineered immune cells so that they can penetrate and kill solid tumors grown in the lab.

They created a light-activated switch that controls protein function associated with cell structure and shape and incorporated it into natural killer cells, a type of immune cell that fights infections and tumors.

When these cells are exposed to blue light, they morph and can then migrate into tumor spheroids – 3D tumors grown in the lab from either mouse or human cell lines – and kill tumor cells. This novel approach could improve cell-based immunotherapies, the researchers said.

‘Optogenetically engineered Septin-7 enhances immune cell infiltration of tumor spheroids’.”

Authors: Jiaxing Chen, Brianna Hnath, Congzhou Sha, Lynne Beidler, Todd Schell, Nikolay Dokholyan.

Hung Trinh: Researchers have re-engineered immune cells that penetrate and kill solid tumors

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Hung Trinh: Researchers have re-engineered immune cells that penetrate and kill solid tumors