immunotherapies tagged posts

Researchers at Duke Cancer Institute have tracked the missing T-cells in glioblastoma patients in the bone marrow, locked away and unable to function because of a process the brain stimulates in response to glioblastoma, to other tumors that metastasize in the brain and even to injury.
Credit: Alisa Weigandt for Duke Health

A mysterious lack of T-cells has hindered the immune system’s ability to fight glioblastoma. Researchers have tracked the missing T-cells in glioblastoma patients. They found them in abundance in the bone marrow, locked away and unable to function because of a process the brain stimulates in response to glioblastoma, to other tumors that metastasize in the brain and even to injury.

Glioblastoma brain tumors can have an unusual effect on the body’s immune system, often ca...

Chimeric antigen receptors (CARs): (a) anatomy and evolution of CAR design, and (b) CAR T cells recognize specific antigens on cancer cell surface and trigger T-cell–mediated killing.

Researchers from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center have harnessed the power of CRISPR/Cas9 to create more-potent chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells that enhance tumor rejection in mice. The unexpected findings uncover facets of CAR immunobiology and underscore the potential of CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to advance immunotherapies for cancer.

CRISPR is a genome-editing tool that enables scientists to cut and manipulate a cell’s DNA with high precision. In the Nature paper, MSK investigators show that CRISPR technology can deliver the CAR gene to a very specific location in the genome of the T cell...