by University of British Columbia
A University of British Columbia research team has developed a new, fast, efficient process for producing cancer-fighting immune cells in the lab. The discovery could help transform the field of immune cell therapy from an expensive, niche endeavor to something easily scalable and broadly applicable.
“We’ve figured out the minimal necessary steps to efficiently guide pluripotent stem cells to develop in the dish into immune cells, in particular, T cells,” said Dr. Yale Michaels, referring to the most essential cells of the human immune system. “One of the next steps we’re working on is to scale this up and make it work more efficiently so that we can make enough cells to treat patients.”
The breakthrough paper, published last week in Science Advances by Dr. Michaels, Ph.D. student John Edgar, and a team from Dr. Peter Zandstra’s lab at UBC’s Michael Smith Laboratories and School of Biomedical Engineering, describes a novel method that is now the fastest known way to produce T cells in the lab.