Surprising Science — August 16, 2010

Immune-Cell Therapy

"A team of MIT engineers has devised a way to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor." The procedure reduces health risks.

bigthinkeditor

“A team of MIT engineers has devised a way to deliver the necessary drugs by smuggling them on the backs of the cells sent in to fight the tumor.” The procedure reduces health risks. “The new approach could dramatically improve the success rate of immune-cell therapies, which hold promise for treating many types of cancer, says Darrell Irvine, senior author of a paper describing the technique in the Aug. 15 issue of Nature Medicine. ‘What we’re looking for is the extra nudge that could take immune-cell therapy from working in a subset of people to working in nearly all patients, and to take us closer to cures of disease rather than slowing progression,’ says Irvine, associate professor of biological engineering and materials science and engineering and a member of MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.”

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