Research into basic workings of immune system points to way of improving therapies for cancer
Friday, October 28, 2016 - 05:31
in Health & Medicine
In people with chronic infections or cancer, disease-fighting T cells tend to behave like an overworked militia - wheezing, ill-prepared, tentative - in a state of "exhaustion" that allows disease to persist. In a new paper, researchers have found that in mice with chronic viral infection, exhausted T cells are controlled by a fundamentally different set of molecular circuits than T cells effectively battling infections or cancer -- a finding that suggests a way to increase the staying power of CAR T cells, a promising form of immunotherapy for cancer.