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How to supercharge cancer-fighting cells: give them stem cell skills


The bioengineered immune players called CAR T cells last longer and work better if pumped up with a large dose of a protein that makes them resemble stem cells.

The papers “open a new avenue for engineering therapeutic T cells for cancer patients”, says Tuoqi Wu, an immunologist at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas who was not involved in the research. A separate team led by immunologists Phillip Darcy, Junyun Lai and Paul Beavis at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, Australia, reached the same conclusion with different methods 2. The researchers engineered CAR T cells to produce extra-high levels of FOXO1 and showed that they became more stem-like, but also reached maturity and fight cancer without becoming exhausted.

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