(credit: Sharon Lees/Great Ormond Street Hospital)
With genetic tweaks and snips, researchers created cancer-busting immune cells that, so far, seem to have wiped out a life-threatening form of leukemia in a one-year-old girl.
The new cells are one-size-fits-all, beating out earlier cell-based cancer therapies that required custom engineering of each patient’s own immune cells. If proven effective in more trials, the new, generic cells could offer an easy, off-the-shelf treatment for life-threatening forms of leukemia.
“It is something we’ve been waiting for,” said Stephan Grupp, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the research. Previous methods requiring engineering cells, specifically T cells, from every single patient could be slow, costly, and impossible in some patients with low T cell counts. “The innovation here is gene-editing T cells so that one person’s T cells could be given to another even if they are not a donor match,” he said in a statement.
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