By Nick Lavars,
Stem cells that can be engineered to take on different properties continue to show huge potential in all areas of medicine, ranging from Parkinson’s disease treatments to regenerative therapies for injured tendons. Scientists adapting this technology for difficult-to-treat tumors have developed a highly efficient off-the-shelf approach that showed “profound efficacy” in mouse models of aggressive brain cancer, laying the groundwork for clinical trials.
The idea of using stem cells engineered to target tumor cells is starting to gain traction as a way of tackling difficult-to-treat cancers, and highly aggressive brain cancers known as glioblastomas (GBMs) are a prime candidate. Many drugs are unable to access these tumors due to the blood-brain barrier that prevents their passage, and while surgery can be effective at eliminating the initial tumor the rate of tumor recurrence is more than 90 percent.
The authors of the new study were exploring ways of intervening post-surgery to lower this rate of recurrence, leading them to the idea of therapies involving engineered cells. Many of these approaches involve harvesting the patient’s own cells and exposing them to reprogramming factors that supercharge their cancer-fighting abilities before returning them to the body, with engineered CAR T cell therapy among the most common and promising approaches.