Article: https://scitechdaily.com/mit-and-harvard-build-invisible-immune-cells-that-obliterate-cancer/
Abstract in pdf: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-63863-8.pdf
Your thoughts? How would they implement this in the future if it’s promising?
Killing tumors in mouse xenografts is the easy part, definitely curious to see it progress to human trials.
Considering how unimaginably effective CAR-T has proven to be, this seems like a promising spin-off of the basic idea to me.
My father just got diagnosed with bladder cancer this month. He’s started some treatments he’s in a, I mean I know cancer isn’t good no matter what stage but bacially pre-cancer is you will, where it hasn’t past the bone. He goes in for a surgery tomorrow where they coat his bladder with something.
So I’ve been following cancer news and science stuff.
Sending well wishes, love, and light for a speedy recovery!
Thank you
Personalized cell based therapies are brilliant and arguably have the best potential for treating the widest variety of cancers with the least side effects. Surgical removal of affected organs or tissues in early stage is great provided the organ/tissue isn’t essential and is easily removed, but unfortunately that is rarely the case. Most chemotherapies aren’t great because of all the off target effects, same with radiation but at least the equipment for radiation has gotten substantially better at very precise targeting.
Implementation of this would involve sequencing an individuals cancerous cells to identify the appropriate target for the CAR, making the lentiviral vector to carry the CAR to target the cancer and shRNA to cut the immune response, taking a blood sample from the patient to harvest NK cells, transfecting and culturing the modified NK cells, and reinfusing the cells into the patient. Theoretically this could be done in a matter of weeks from diagnosis, possibly even days if every part of the logistics chain put it at top priority.
Best of luck to your father and family. Catching it early is always the best case.
Edit: I don’t read so good, it looks like the intent is actually to use NK cells from assorted healthy donors, not the patient. In that case I wonder how liability, patents, FDA approval and all the fun legal stuff behind pharma would work with this technology. I would imagine hospitals that actually pull the biopsy and infuse the modified cells want as little liability as possible so they would farm out the sequencing to someone like Quest Diagnostics or LabCorp who would then send the data to a biologics CDMO to make the lentivirus and transfect the NKs. The CDMO might maintain their own NK cultures or possibly get them from something like a blood bank and then be responsible for all the QA/QC of the finished cells. CDMO then sends the modified cells to the hospital and patient gets infused. My guess is that pharma corps will patent the sequences for CAR + immunosuppressing RNAs for any of the more common antigens and get the FDA approval. Making truly fine tuned CARs to the exact antigen presenting for each individual patients cancer would probably not be viable for FDA approval.
Unfortunately this is probably the only way that this therapy would be viable – doing a custom cell culture and gene modification for every single patient = probably $10m per patient… What is needed is some kind of immune-inert cell that works on the great majority of patients.