Crafting a better T cell for immunotherapy
New technology, not yet tested in humans, aims to reduce patients' waiting time, increase potency of T-cell therapy
- Date:
- February 22, 2016
- Source:
- Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
- Summary:
- T-cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy, involves engineering the patient's T cells in the laboratory to carry new proteins that guide the immune cells directly to tumor cells, allowing the engineered T cells to attack and kill the cancer. Now, a group of researchers has devised a new approach that could speed and improve this process, using a special, small protein tag that can be used to purify and track the T cells once they have been engineered in the laboratory.
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T-cell therapy, a form of immunotherapy that uses a patient's own immune cells to attack their cancer, has been making waves recently. The "living" therapy involves engineering the patient's T cells in the laboratory to carry new proteins that guide the immune cells directly to tumor cells, allowing the engineered T cells to attack and kill the cancer.
Now, a group of researchers led by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center immunotherapy researcher Dr. Stanley Riddell has devised a new approach that could speed and improve this process, using a special, small protein tag that can be used to purify and track the T cells once they have been engineered in the laboratory.
Riddell and his team describe the approach, and its effect on human cancer cells in the laboratory and on a mouse model of lymphoma, in a study in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Although not yet tested in humans, the researchers believe this new approach could improve on current T-cell therapy methods in several ways:
- by boosting the cells' potency,
- by growing larger numbers of cancer-fighting T cells,
- by adding a potential "kill switch" to quickly deactivate the cells in patients' bodies in the event of toxic side effects and
- by cutting down the immune cell processing time from the current 14 to 20 days before reinfusion to 9 days or less.
Juno Therapeutics, a biotechnology company initially formed on technology from researchers at Fred Hutch, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Seattle Children's Research Institute, has an exclusive license to the tag technology for uses related to oncology (as well as a non-exclusive license for other purposes).
Story Source:
Materials provided by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Original written by Rachel Tompa. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
Journal Reference:
- Lingfeng Liu, Daniel Sommermeyer, Alexandra Cabanov, Paula Kosasih, Tyler Hill, Stanley R Riddell. Inclusion of Strep-tag II in design of antigen receptors for T-cell immunotherapy. Nature Biotechnology, 2016; DOI: 10.1038/nbt.3461
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