Arming T Cells with IL-24 Improves the Ability to Destroy Cancerous Cells

Altering T cells of the adaptive immune system to enable recognition of cancerous cells is a mainstream area of research these days. The approach of adding chimeric antigen receptors to T cells, tailored to a cancer, is well established for blood cancers, but still challenging for solid tumors, characterized a wide variety of cancerous cells and signatures. Researchers here show that genetic modification of T cells to produce IL-24 allows these immune cells to effectively destroy cancerous cells that lack recognizable surface features, so long as they are close to cancerous cells that can be recognized. Further, the process of cancer cell destruction via IL-24 leads to the ability of the immune system to later recognize those cells as cancerous, suppressing the possibility of recurrence of the cancer. A protein called IL-24 attacks a variety of cancers in several different ways. Researchers now deliver the gene coding for IL-24, which is called MDA-7, to solid tumors using T cells. This isn't the first time T cells have been engineered for cancer immunotherapy. Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cell therapy - which is designed to destroy cancer cells expressing specific surface molecules - has shown tremendous success for treating advanced cancers of the blood and lymphatic systems. But CAR-T has made limited progress on solid tumors, such as prostate cancer or melanoma, because the cells that make up those tumors aren't all the same, which blocks the engineered T ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs