One of the newest weapons that scientists have developed against cancer is a type of engineered immune cell known as CAR-NK (natural killer) cells. Similar to CAR-T cells, these cells can be programmed to attack cancer cells.
MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have now come up with a new way to engineer CAR-NK cells that makes them much less likely to be rejected by the patient's
immune system, which is a common drawback of this type of treatment.
The new advance may also make it easier to develop "off-the-shelf" CAR-NK cells that could be given to patients as soon as they are diagnosed. Traditional approaches to engineering CAR-NK or CAR-T cells usually take several weeks.
"This enables us to do one-step engineering of CAR-NK cells that can avoid rejection by host T cells and other immune cells. And, they kill
cancer cells better and they're safer," says Jianzhu Chen, an MIT professor of biology, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and one of the senior authors of the study.
