Patented biotechnology: Immune-cell booster for cancer patients
Cancer patients might one day benefit from being administered immune cells from healthy donors. But as things stand, receiving donor cells can cause severe or even fatal immune reactions. A researcher from the Synthetic Immunology lab of Sai Reddy has now developed a technology that avoids these.
Abstract
- If immunocompromised people were to receive white blood cells from donors, this could cause a severe immune reaction.
- Cell therapy against cancer is therefore based on the patients' own blood cells.
- If an important protein complex in donor cells is replaced by a synthetic complex, foreign cells could also be used in the fight against cancer.
- The further development of the new, patented technology is supported by the innovation agency Innosuisse.
Edo Kapetanovic is a medical doctor, but for a while now he has devoted himself entirely to research in synthetic immunology. He has completed his doctoral studies in immunoengineering and is working at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel. His big goal is to develop new cancer therapies by providing patients with immune cells derived from donor blood. He is now getting closer to this goal: he has managed to modify donor cells so that they attack only the tumour cells and not patient’s healthy cells. The technology has been tested in the lab in human cells, but it will take more time and development before the patients can benefit from the technology.
Administering donor cells is far from straightforward: the immune system is specialised in distinguishing foreign molecules from ‘self’ and will attack any foreign cell. This is particularly dangerous for immunocompromised patients, as donor cells can recognize patient cells as foreign and trigger a violent and, consequently, fatal immune response in the recipient, known as a graft-versus-host reaction. That is why today’s immunotherapeutic treatments for cancer mainly use a patient’s own immune cells rather than donated cells.
Kapetanovic and his team have now succeeded in engineering immune cells that are safe of graft-versus-host reaction.
Read on > full-length ETH News.
“This would make it possible to administer cells from any donor to any patient.”Edo Kapetanovic, Systems and Synthetic Immunology lab, D-BSSE, ETH Zurich
Find the full-length ETH News (in English and German).
Learn about the Systems and Synthetic Immunology lab led by Sai Reddy.