MIT nanoparticles turn immune cells into cancer fighters inside mice

Engineered immune cell treatments known as CAR therapies have changed care for some blood cancers. But making them is slow and costly: a patient's cells are removed, modified in a lab and infused back.

An MIT team led by chemical engineering professor Daniel Anderson reports a way to skip that step, at least in mice. The work appears in Nature Biotechnology, according to MIT News.

The approach

The researchers packed genetic instructions (mRNA) for a cancer-targeting receptor into tiny fat-based particles. They coated the particles with antibody fragments that latch onto natural killer, or NK, cells, a type of immune cell that destroys infected or abnormal cells. Once injected, the particles reprogrammed NK cells inside the body.

NK cells may have an edge for diseases driven by T cells, the team says, because engineered T cells aimed at T cell targets can end up attacking one another.

Results in mice

The lymphoma results were similar to those from conventional lab-made CAR NK cells, the team said.

Limits

All of the work was in mice, some groups were very small, and the MIT article does not report safety data or how long the effects lasted. No CAR NK therapy has yet won U.S. approval. The group hopes to test the approach next against T cell-driven diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis.

The research was funded in part by Sanofi and the National Cancer Institute.