Will Programmable Immune "Cellbots" Be the Next Weapon Against Cancer?
Summary
Researcher Wendell Lim (pictured) and his lab mates at the University of California, San Francisco, believe they can improve upon early immunotherapies by rewiring a key component of the immune system: the roving attack dogs called T cells that sniff out and kill intruders.Lim and company want to go further than current CAR-T therapies, not just tinkering with a part of a gene here and there, but making genetic manipulations that alter fundamental principles of T cells: how they gather information about their surroundings and react to what’s around them.“We’d like to have a more uniform, systematic kind of programming logic and language.” Earlier this year, Lim and colleagues published their first work on what they call “synNotch” cells—named so because the researchers have redesigned the Notch receptor, which extends outside the cell like a powerful nose that sniffs out its surroundings.Even the successful therapies, to treat types of leukemia and lymphoma, also kill healthy immune cells that share the tumor target, though the side effects of that are generally manageable.Yvonne Chen, who runs a synthetic biology lab at UCLA working on similar problems as Lim, calls synNotch “a powerful platform” that could have many uses.