New method moves promising strategy closer to clinical use
(July 15, 2015) In
recent years, researchers have hotly pursued immunotherapy, a promising form of
treatment that relies on harnessing and training the body’s own immune system
to better fight cancer and infection. Now, results of a study led by Johns
Hopkins investigators suggests that a device composed of a magnetic column
paired with custom-made magnetic nanoparticles may hold a key to bringing
immunotherapy into widespread and successful clinical use. A summary of the research,
conducted in mouse and human cells, appears online July 14 in the journal ACS
Nano.
The Johns Hopkins team focused on training and rapidly
multiplying immune system white blood cells known as T cells because of their
potential as an effective weapon against cancer, according to Jonathan Schneck,
M.D., Ph.D., a professor of pathology, medicine and oncology at the Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine’s Institute for Cell Engineering. “The
challenge has been to train these cells efficiently enough, and get them to
divide fast enough, that we could use them as the basis of a therapy for cancer
patients. We’ve taken a big step toward solving that problem,” he says.
In a bid to simplify and streamline immune cellular
therapies, Schneck, Karlo Perica, a recent M.D./Ph.D. graduate who worked in
Schneck’s lab, and others worked with artificial white blood cells. These
so-called artificial antigen-presenting cells (aAPCs) were pioneered by
Schneck’s lab and have shown promise in activating laboratory animals’ immune
systems to attack cancer cells.