Scientists grow a universal army of T-lymphocytes to destroy cancer

Scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles were able to transform iPSC into adult T-cells that mature in our thymus and patrol the body to destroy cancer and other diseases.

The work, published in Cell Stem Cell, was conducted under the direction of Gey Crooks, MD, professor of pathology and laboratory medicine and pediatrics. Dr. Crookes is the co-director of the Eli and Edith Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and the Center for the Study of Stem Cells at UCLA.

Army of T lymphocytes to destroy cancer

T cells are usually produced by the bone marrow and matured in the thymus , a small organ located behind the sternum, which sends them into the body to patrol and destroy cancer and infection. The thymus begins to decrease quite early in life and trains a continuously decreasing number of T-cells as we age. Reducing it is known as involution, and aging of the immune system is the reason that we become vulnerable to diseases.

As described in the new publication, Dr. Crookes and her team at the University of California used artificial thymus organoids, small organ-like structures that mimic the thymus, for the purpose of growing and training human T cells. The group uses these organoids to grow mature T-cells from iPSC. Organoids can grow a self-renewing supply of T-cells, as well as a thymus in your body.

Pluripotent stem cells or iPSC are cells that can turn into any cell of the body with the right signals, and we learned how to grow them back in 2007 using cell reprogramming.

The ability to grow an unlimited army of T-cells is important in the fight against cancer, especially with the help of immunotherapy , and can also be used in the fight against infections, including HIV, CMV and autoimmune diseases.
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Immune therapies, such as CAR T , have shown great potential in cancer treatment; but now they are very complex. You need to take the T cells from the patient, change them and insert a new receptor into them to help them detect the cancer cells and return them to the human body.

Unfortunately, the effectiveness of modified T-cells is sometimes small. Another problem with therapies such as CAR T is their price, since such therapy must be personalized to the patient. Cancer patients may also not have enough T cells to take samples.

All of these factors seriously limit the effectiveness of T-cell immunotherapy. This new technique has the potential to change everything.

Scientists have worked on it for several years and have previously shown that they can grow mature T-cells in artificial organisms of the thymus using blood stem cells. At that time, they hypothesized that they could achieve the same results using iPSC, and their new work showed it.

Scientists have shown that artificial thymus organelles can use both embryonic stem cells - ESC and iPSC, two types of pluripotent stem cells used in bioengineering. IPSCs are the lightest stem cells to receive, as they can be easily obtained from adult skin or blood cells.

Scientists have also been able to genetically alter iPSC so that they express the T cell receptor that targets cancer. In combination with artificial thymus organoids, they obtained T-cells capable of detecting and destroying specific tumors in mice. The plan was to grow genetically engineered iPSC lines, which can then be programmed into tumor-specific T cells.

Many cancer cells avoid T-cells, fooling them and hiding. These tumor-specific stem cell lines can be obtained in unlimited quantities, and from them you can get a whole army of T-cells, looking for and destroying cancer, regardless of how he tries to hide.

Last obstacle

Although this is good news for immunotherapy, there is still an obstacle that needs to be overcome. T cells grown using this technique have marker molecules on their membranes that can trigger an immune response.

The next step for scientists will be the cultivation of human T cells that have receptors that recognize cancer, but lack molecules that cause an immune response. These cell lines can be obtained in unlimited quantities and used in immunotherapy.

This technique will allow you to grow an unlimited number of T-cells without the need to extract them from any source, and it does not require their changes to avoid an immune response. This would be a huge breakthrough in immunotherapy, and such treatment would be cost-effective. It is easy to imagine universal T-cell treatments for cancer and many other diseases in the near future.

Conclusion

Having an unlimited number of universal T cells capable of fighting cancer could help win the war, and scientists seem to be approaching this goal. The use of altered immune cells in the destruction of cancer is the final decision in the war, and we are enthusiastically looking at its advantages compared with techniques such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy, which are rude and cause considerable damage to the patient.

From the point of view of anti-aging, this massive cultivation of T-cells can also be used to rejuvenate the immune system.

We live in an exciting century of regenerative medicine, and the techniques we will soon receive will forever change our treatment of disease.