by Rameesha Sajwar – Wonderful Engineering
Gene-editing technology CRISPR has been used to remove genes from immune system cells to make them better at fighting cancer. Recently, PACT Pharma and UCLA have used CRISPR to remove and add genes to these cells to help them recognize a patient’s specific tumor cells.
“It is probably the most complicated therapy ever attempted in the clinic,” study co-author Antoni Ribas told Nature. “We’re trying to make an army out of a patient’s own T cells.”
“If [T cells] see something that looks not normal, they kill it,” lead author Stefanie Mandl, who serves as CSO of PACT Pharma, told Nature. “But in the patients, we see in the clinic with cancer, at some point the immune system kind of lost the battle and the tumor grew.”
Scientists have developed “CAR-T cell therapies” to help T cells be better at finding proteins found on the surfaces of blood cancer cells and targeting them specifically.