T-Cell Battery: Boosting Immunity to Fight Cancer
T cells are our first line of defense against cancer. But fighting tumors exhausts them. Now scientists have found a way to equip these cells with extra “batteries” so they can fight for longer. The first lucky ones in this area are mice.
No, it's not “scientists have beaten cancer,” and not even on mice. The human body is too complex for any one element to “improve the health of the whole body” at once. That's why articles like this, as well as materials about the brain, psyche, and consciousness, are consistently gather in the community. Subscribe to receive fresh materials first.
Immunity and Cancer
In a fair fight, the immune system would destroy cancer with ease – but this insidious disease is highly adaptive. Along with numerous tricks to avoid detection, tumors create a microenvironment around themselves that is toxic to immune cells and drains their energy.
Immune cells are forced to maintain sustained activity against the pathogen. It is the systemic load and work in a toxic environment that deplete T cells.
Finding ways to recharge the immune system to continue the fight is a top goal of immunotherapy. A team of scientists from Brigham and Women's Hospital has demonstrated new way to update T cells, essentially by replacing their batteries.
Battery of immune cells
Mitochondria are the organelles that produce chemical energy for cells, but during T cell depletion, these little batteries are easily damaged or lost.
Previous studies have shown that cancer cells can use nanotubes as “tiny tentacles” to suck mitochondria from immune cells.
In a new study, scientists found that they could use the same mechanism, but for completely opposite purposes – pumping new mitochondria into T cells from bone marrow stromal cells (BMSCs). Biohackers will appreciate.
Creating batteries for immune cells
The team cultured BMSCs and T cells in symbiosis and after 48 hours found that up to a quarter of the T cells had acquired extra mitochondria. The researchers called these enhanced immune cells Mito+.
In mice, the Mito+ cells were found to be more easily able to penetrate tumors, and their attack was much more powerful and effective. The tumors shrank dramatically, and 75% of the treated mice survived the full 60-day study period. In contrast, the tumors continued to grow in the control mice, and all of them died by the 20-day mark.
Interestingly, Mito+ cells were able to rapidly multiply and pass on their extra mitochondria to new cells. Other immune cells, such as lymphocytes and CAR-T cells, also showed improved cancer-killing abilities after receiving extra mitochondria.
These supercharged T cells overcome one of the fundamental barriers to immunotherapy by penetrating tumors and surviving immune sterility. Mitochondria support them by acting as fuel. It’s like we take the T cells to a gas station and refuel them. This mitochondrial transplant is the dawn of organellar therapy, where an organelle is delivered to a cell to make it more effective.
Shiladitya Sengupta, co-author of the study.
The team of scientists say that in future, bone marrow stem cells could be taken from patients and used to boost their own immune cells, which could then be returned to the body to more effectively fight cancer.
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