A pharmacy on the back of a cell
Clinical trials using patients’ own immune cells to target tumors have yielded promising results. However, this approach usually works only if the patients also receive large doses of drugs designed to help immune cells multiply rapidly, and those drugs have life-threatening side effects.Now a team of MIT engineers has devised a way to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor. That way, the drugs reach only their intended targets, greatly reducing the risk to the patient. The new approach could dramatically improve the success rate of immune-cell therapies, which hold promise for treating many types of cancer, says Darrell Irvine, senior author of a paper describing the technique in the Aug. 15 issue of Nature Medicine.“What we’re looking for is the extra nudge that could take immune-cell therapy from working in a subset of people to working in...