Fighting Fire with fire
Professor Carl H. June and his team in Philadelphia, are developing and testing a new ways to turn the power of the immune system on leukemia ( a cancer caused by the white cells growing out of control.
Professor Carl H. June, a highly respected scientist working on cancer, HIV and the immune system and his team developed a technique in which they collect special ‘killer’ immune cells, called T cells, from a cancer patient. These are then ‘reprogrammed’ in the lab using a modified virus, which is very good at smuggling genes into the T cells.
In this case, the researchers added genes carrying instructions that tell the T cells to make a new protein called a “chimeric antigen receptor” – this lets them lock on to molecules found on the surface of cancer cells, killing them in the process.
These reprogrammed T cells are then injected back into the patient, where they grow and multiply, creating an army of killer cells to fight the disease.
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