Breakthrough: The University of Illinois has designed engineered T-cells that can identify and attack solid tumor cancer cells in humans and mice.

Introduction: car-t therapy has been successfully used in the treatment of hematological malignancies such as lymphoma and leukemia.it changes the patient's own T cells by adding antibodies that recognize the unique characteristics of the cancer cell surface.in a new study at the University of Illinois, scientists have designed engineered T cells that greatly broaden the potential targets of this method and can attack various solid tumor cancer cells in humans and mice.they reported their findings in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.car T cells have shown great promise in the treatment of hematopoietic cancer, but challenges remain, including antigen loss and identification of solid tumor targets.preeti Sharma, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, said cancer cells express certain proteins on their surface, which are caused by different kinds of mutations.in this work, they studied protein targets attached to short sugar chains.abnormally short sugar chains in some types of cancer cells are caused by mutations that disrupt the molecular pathways that connect these sugars to proteins.drugs that bind to abnormal sugars give priority to identifying cancer cells and retaining healthy cells.David Kranz, a member of the Illinois cancer center and professor of Biochemistry at the Carl R. Woese Institute for genomic biology, said car-t treatment is a promising treatment for some types of blood cancer. However, it is more difficult to identify binding sites in solid tumors.the team started with an antibody that can be used as a receptor.the antibody is known to interact with specific types of abnormally formed sugars that are linked to proteins on solid tumor cells in mice.since this receptor binds to both proteins and sugars on the surface of cancer cells, there may be room to change the antibody so that it can bind to more than one protein attached to a short sugar.this may prompt a broad response to different types of cancer.ki Cai, another postdoctoral researcher in Kranz laboratory, tested whether changes in amino acid sequences near abnormal sugars affected the binding of the receptor to the site.this allowed the team to determine if the antibody could be changed slightly to accommodate other carbohydrate linked cancer targets.the researchers conducted a series of mutation experiments on the basic part of the antibody, produced nearly 10 million receptor mutants, and then screened to find the desired characteristics - to expand the specificity of the antibody to react with not only mouse targets, but also human targets. as soon as antibodies with ideal properties were found, they were engineered into T cells and tested with mouse and human cancer cell lines. their modified T cells showed activity against both human and mouse cancer cell lines. and T cells can now recognize several different proteins with short sugars. this is very important because in cancer treatment, most of the time, researchers are pursuing a single target on cancer cells, and it is difficult to put cancer into the door if there are multiple targets. although these engineered cells are in the early stage of development, they can use the same T-cell products to study the efficacy and safety of anti-cancer in mice and humans. reference: Recommended Reading: anti epidemic, translational medicine network content team report: JAMA large-scale prospective study analysis shows that smoking cessation, alcohol restriction and garlic consumption has the final say. [new findings] Chinese studies have shown that maternal obesity increases the chance of future generations to develop liver cancer