Chimeric Antigen Receptor Strategies can be Used to Target and Destroy Specific Classes of Unwanted Immune Cell

The work noted here is targeted at curing autoimmune conditions by removing the misconfigured immune cells that attack important infrastructure in tissues. This is good news for all autoimmunity in which the relevant biochemistry is fairly well understood - where the target immune cells can be well described in terms of their distinctive surface chemistry. However this is also very good news for the prospects of rejuvenating the aged adaptive immune system, wherein much of the problem is that the available capacity for immune cells is used up by an excess of cells uselessly specific to persistent viruses such as cytomegalovirus. There are too many of those cells and too little space left over for cells capable of responding to new threats. Clearing out the majority of those unwanted cells would go a fair way towards removing the contribution of the failing immune system to increased vulnerability to pathogens, cancer risk, and presence of senescent cells in aging. All that is needed is a good technology platform on which to build such a targeted therapy, and the work here seems like a sizable step in the right direction. Researchers have found a way to remove the subset of antibody-making cells that cause an autoimmune disease, without harming the rest of the immune system. The key element in the new strategy is based on an artificial target-recognizing receptor, called a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, which can be engineered into patients' T cells. In human tria...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs