Improving the Infrastructure for Therapeutic Transfer of T Cells

I suspect that we'll see spreading use of immune cell transfer therapies in the years ahead. The time is right for it: stem cell researchers are continually improving their ability to generate cells to order, knowledge of how the immune system works in detail is growing, and so is the understanding of just how important immune system decline is in aging. Somewhere between today and a future in which an age-damaged immune system can be completely restored to youthful function lies a span of decades in which regular infusions of tailored immune cells are a routine part of older life, a treatment that temporarily enhances immune system function across the board, or which can be used to attack specific targets such as an infection or a cancer. For this to come to pass the infrastructure for such therapies must improve, becoming more efficient, more reliable, and much less costly than is presently the case. This is happening now, step by step, such the progress cited in this article. It is aimed at use for transplant patients, but should be relevant to a range of similar future applications: Therapeutic transfer of virus-specific T cells to immunocompromised patients can help battle life-threatening infections, but the process for generating such cells is lengthy and laborious. A [recently published] paper suggests a speedy alternative. Ten days in culture was all it took for researchers to generate multivirus-specific T cells that, when transferred into transplant patients, cou...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs