This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: MIT engineers have developed a new way to program natural killer (NK) immune cells to target cancerous T cells or T cells that have become autoreactive, leading to diseases such as lymphoma and autoimmune hepatitis. Using their new technique, the researchers can reprogram NK cells to target diseased T cells without ever removing the NK cells from the patient's body.
Instead, they use lipid nanoparticles to deliver messenger RNA directly to NK cells. These mRNA molecules encode proteins that allow the NK cells to seek and destroy the dysfunctional T cells. Known as CAR NK cells, these cells could be deployed against a variety of diseases.
The MIT team's new approach could bypass one of the major obstacles to using these cells, which is the time and expense of manufacturing them outside the body. "The manufacturing challenges with CAR NK cells are significant. The idea here is you can deliver a nanoparticle that will modify your own NK cells with a CAR construct and teach them to attack tumor cells," says Daniel Anderson, a professor in MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.
Anderson is the senior author of the study, which appears in Nature Biotechnology. The paper's lead authors are MIT postdoc Yuang Chen and MIT graduate students Julia Monkovic and Haseeb Mughal. Robert Langer, the David H.
Koch Institute Professor at MIT, is also an author. Over the past decade, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved seven new cancer treatments based on engineered T cells called chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells.
Chimeric antigen receptors are proteins that can be embedded into T cells, allowing them to detect a target antigen, such as a cancer protein. When the target is detected, the T cell becomes activated and destroys the target cell. This approach has had great success in treating blood cancers, primarily those that originate from B cells, including several types of leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma.
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