New Cell Therapy Approach for Cancer Treatment Developed

Scientists at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital have developed a new cell therapy approach that has the potential to eliminate established tumors and prevent cancer from recurring, as published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

This comes as the team of scientists tested their dual-action, cancer-killing vaccine in an advanced mouse model of the deadly brain cancer glioblastoma, with promising results.

“Our team has pursued a simple idea: to take cancer cells and transform them into cancer killers and vaccines,” said Dr. Khalid Shah, the corresponding author of the study and the Director of the Center for Stem Cell and Translational Immunotherapy (CSTI) at the hospital.

The approach taken by the team differs from that of cancer vaccines under development as instead of using inactivated tumor cells, the team repurposes living tumor cells, which possess an unusual feature.

The cells have the ability to travel long distances across the brain to return to the site of their fellow tumor cells, which team used this property to engineer living tumor cells using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9 and repurposed them to release tumor cell killing agents.

The engineered tumor cells were also designed to express factors that would make them easy for the immune system to spot, tag and remember, priming the immune system for a long-term anti-tumor response.

The repurposed cells were tested in different mouse strains, including one that bore bone marrow, liver, and thymus cells derived from humans, mimicking the human immune microenvironment.

The team also built a two-layered safety switch into the cancer cell, which, when activated, eradicates the engineered cells if needed.

This dual-action cell therapy was safe, applicable, and efficacious in the mouse models, providing a roadmap for future therapies. While further testing and development are needed, the team specifically chose this model and used human cells to smooth the path of translating their findings for patient settings.

“Throughout all of the work that we do in the Center, even when it is highly technical, we never lose sight of the patient,” said Dr. Shah. “Our goal is to take an innovative but translatable approach so that we can develop a therapeutic, cancer-killing vaccine that ultimately will have a lasting impact in medicine.”
Dr. Shah and his colleagues note that this therapeutic strategy is applicable to a wider range of solid tumors and that further investigations of its applications are warranted. (GFB)