Nat Immunol: Heavy! Enhance the therapeutic benefits of immunotherapy by reprogramming T-cells into stem cell-like memory cells!

7, 2020 // -- In a recent study published in the international journal Nature Immunology, scientists from Georgetown University and other institutions said that immune system T cells may be reprogrammed as renewable stem cell-like memory cells (TSCM), a long-lived and highly active superimmune cell with strong tumor resistance. The
reprogramming process involves a new method developed by researchers that inhibits the activity of a protein called MEK1/2, which is currently used to effectively treat melanoma, but this study shows that MEK inhibitors do not target specific types of cancer cells, but can widely reprogram T cells to look for multiple types of cancer.
, M.D., notes that while immunotherapy has improved survival in cancer patients in recent years, survival rates are still below optimal, so researchers urgently need to develop a new and effective anti-cancer immunotherapy.
Photo Source: In the NIAID study, researchers used drugs already approved for humans to significantly enhance the immunotherapy measures currently available, allowing for a better and more lasting anti-cancer response in the patient's body.
researchers experimented with human cells in the lab and then confirmed the effects of such methods in mouse bodies; now they can not only identify a new method that uses MEK1/2 inhibitors to reprogram T cells into TSCM cells, but also identify new molecular mechanisms induced by TSCMs.
researchers found that reprogramming T-cells as TSCM or significantly improving T-cell therapy for cancer patients is a widely used tool for treating specific types of cancer and used in clinical trials to isolate immune system T-cells from the patient's blood, then engineer them and expand their ability to target tumor cells Finally, reinfusion will help the patient effectively fight cancer; in the experiments conducted by the researchers, human T-cells can be reprogrammed as TSCM cells using MEK inhibitors, and when MEK inhibitors are used to treat mice, reprogramming T-cells can induce the production of effective TSCMs. Khleif, a
researcher, says stem cell research plays a key role in strengthening patients' body's resilience to multiple diseases, and support for stem cell therapy is welcome, with the shift from government or private funders to fund stem cell research or to help accelerate ongoing research in this understated area.
Now that researchers have found that MEK inhibitors can be used to enhance the patient's body's anti-tumor immune response, researchers have begun to delve deeper into the design of specific clinical trials to test the research tools used in cancer patients' bodies, a novel approach that researchers are eager to apply to clinical research as soon as possible and achieve the desired goals.
() Original source: Verma, V., Jafarzadeh, N., Boi, S. et al. MEK inhibition reprograms CD8+ T lymphocytes into memory stem cells with potent antitumor effects. Nat Immunol (2020). doi:10.1038/s41590-020-00818-9。