The research, reported on 18 March in Nature1, adds new safety features to an emerging class of cancer treatments known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T-cell therapies that are produced in the body. The development could lead to treatments that are cheaper to make and easier to administer than are those currently used against some blood cancers. At present, CAR-T therapies are made from a person's own T cells ' a type of immune cell ' which are isolated, engineered to express a synthetic protein known as a CAR and then reinjected into the body. Reprogramming T cells directly in the body would take less time, but it adds safety concerns, says Justin Eyquem, an immunologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and lead author of the study. For one thing, 'you don't want to edit other cells', he says. 'So we added multiple layers of safety.' CARs are designed to target cancer cells, allowing the engineered T cells to find and destroy tumours ' an approach that has...
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