News Release 21-Oct-2024
Re-engineered, blue light-activated immune cells penetrate and kill solid tumors
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Penn State

HERSHEY, Pa. — Immunotherapies that mobilize a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer have become a treatment pillar. These therapies, including CAR T-cell therapy, have performed well in cancers like leukemias and lymphomas, but the results have been less promising in solid tumors.

A team led by researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine has re-engineered immune cells so that they can penetrate and kill solid tumors grown in the lab. They created a light-activated switch that controls protein function associated with cell structure and shape and incorporated it into natural killer cells, a type of immune cell that fights infections and tumors. When these cells are exposed to blue light, they morph and can then migrate into tumor spheroids — 3D tumors grown in the lab from either mouse or human cell lines — and kill tumor cells. This novel approach could improve cell-based immunotherapies, the researchers said.

The findings will publish this week on October 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers also filed a provisional application to patent the technology described in the paper.

“This technology is totally out of the box. It’s akin to CAR T-cell therapy, but here, the guiding principle is the ability of cells to infiltrate the tumor,” said senior author Nikolay Dokholyan, G. Thomas Passananti Professor at the Penn State College of Medicine and professor of biochemistry and molecular biology. “I don't know of another approach that is anything close to this.”

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