Tag: tumor
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Bridging the “gap” between CAR and solid tumors
Picture credit: flickr.com Since first approved by the FDA in 2017, T cells with chimeric antigen receptors (CAR T) have revolutionized the treatment of blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. Since then, research has been focused on improving the CARs to treat a wide range of cancers including solid tumors – that have proved to…
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Sugar, yes please, won’t you come and put it down on macrophage: A song of sugars and cancers
Our immune system is a well-orchestrated fort, equipped to fight all kinds of nasty that attack our body. Unfortunately, some attackers come well prepared with weapons for immune evasion and can escape or even confuse our immune system, such as with cancer. In the recent years, we have seen a rise of new potential therapies…
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Searching Salmonella infections for a cancer cure
Picture source: Science News The cure for cancer has been used as a talking point for decades. Even the current US president, Joe Biden, promised to cure cancer during his campaign. We certainly don’t need to convince anyone that studying anticancer therapies is an important research topic. According to the CDC, in the United States…
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Are CAR Tregs a reason for CAR therapy failure?
Created with Biorender.com On 12th of September 2022, Zinaida Good, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, tweeted: “We found a CAR Treg subset in CD19-CAR T cells for lymphoma. We hope that this finding will put us on a path from 40% cure to 100% cure”.Only five years earlier, FDA had made historical approval for…
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A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing: Mimicking Tumor with Probiotic
Created using BioRender.com Take a look in the mirror. What do you see? Given that you are reading an immunology blog, I hope your answer would be something along the line of a human being, or Homo sapiens if you want to be fancy. Now, let’s take a closer look together! At the genetic level,…
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Unleashing the Anti-tumor Immune Cells with Dostarlimab
Blocking checkpoint proteins enhance immune cell activity In healthy individuals, the immune system is intricately regulated to maintain homeostasis. Consider it as a see-saw: on the one hand, excessive immune activation in the absence of harmful pathogens may manifest as autoimmune diseases; on the other hand, inadequate immune defense creates vulnerability during infections. The immune…
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A Way Through the Crowd: Motility of macrophages in a dense microenvironment
Macrophages – the most versatile and multipurpose cells of the immune system – scavenge away pathogens and sick cells to protect us from diseases. We have previously mentioned how macrophages also happen to be present in almost every tissue to perform this very function. Most of the immune cells continuously circulate in the blood, but in a…
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Toxoplasma gondii – a new cancer fighting superhero
“Life will win over death, and light will win over darkness”– Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine “I would not be here today if it wasn’t for you and your discovery” – said Tomas Dahl during the meeting in Stockholm. Tomas was one of the cancer patients who had the prestigious chance to share their story…
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A better method for T cell isolation is not so enigMATIC anymore
When we talk on the topic of cancer therapies, the first one that comes to my mind is adoptive T cell therapy using tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs). It has received a lot of good reviews in the last couple of years and persists as a promising tumor therapy for the future. It works on the principle…
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A step towards affordable cell therapy using mRNA technology
This image was created with Biorender.com A decade ago, a novel immunotherapy ravaged two pounds of cancer cells and revolutionized the treatment of blood cancer. This immunotherapy isolated T cells from a patient and inserts a gene encoding synthetic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) ex-vivo into T cells. These CARs contain regions to redirect T cells…
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