Killer immune cells

Immune cells play a crucial role in preventing disease, and scientists have found ways to modify them to attack cancer cells. However, it's not always clear why some patients have better results with this kind of treatment than others.

A revealing case from 2018 helps shed some light on this. Researchers at University of Pennsylvania studied a patient with a type of leukemia who had an extraordinary recovery after receiving modified immune cells, called CAR-T therapy. They discovered that the vast majority of cancer-fighting immune cells in this patient came from a single cell.

Interestingly, this killer T cell had undergone a specific change – the CAR-T treatment had inserted itself into a gene called TET2, which normally plays a role in how DNA is controlled. This change seemed to enhance the T cells' ability to attack cancer, suggesting that targeting the TET2 gene or related pathways might be a new way to improve this type of therapy.