The approach may lead to "off-the-shelf" stocks of cancer-killing cells, say researchers from the University of California, San Diego and the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

In a paper now published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the authors describe how the cells showed enhanced "anti-tumor activity" in mice with ovarian cancer seeded from human cancer cells.

The immunotherapy is a type known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapy. It increases immune cells' cancer-killing power by reprogramming them to express CAR protein, which has been engineered to bind only to cancer cells.

Advantages of natural killer cells

Typically, CAR immunotherapy uses genetically altered white blood cells known as T cells that are grown from cells taken from patients. This approach is called CAR-T cell immunotherapy and has been the focus of much research and funding lately.

But the new approach uses natural killer (NK) cells obtained from human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) instead of patient-specific T cells.

"NK cells," explains senior study author Dan S. Kaufman, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, "offer significant advantages as they don't have to be matched to a specific patient."

Because, he adds, "one batch of iPSC-derived NK cells can be potentially used to treat thousands of patients," it opens the prospect of "standardized, 'off-the-shelf' treatments" for use with other anticancer drugs.

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