Asher Mullard in Nature:
Cancer cells are the ultimate survivors, riddled with mutations that let them thrive when healthy cells would die. These same mutations can boost the ability of game-changing cell therapies to quash cancer, a study in mice shows1.
Among these therapies are chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells, which are already used to treat several types of blood cancer. The new study shows that engineered CAR T cells carrying a mutation that was first found in cancerous T cells can vanquish tumours that don’t respond to current CAR-T therapies.
“It’s a beautiful piece of work and opens the door for better CAR-T therapies in the future,” says Madeleine Duvic, a dermatologist and cancer researcher at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas, who was not involved in the work.
“Natural T-cell function isn’t good enough. We need to explore the extremes of T-cell function,” says Kole Roybal, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and co-author of the new paper. What better place to start than with the mutations that turn healthy T cells into hardier, cancerous ones?
More here.