WASHINGTON — Stem cells with memory may improve a powerful new type of cancer therapy.
Recently, scientists have engineered cells from a patient’s own immune system to fight blood cancers. The treatment with the engineered immune cells, called CAR-T cell therapy, may work even better if doctors transplant a subset of immune cells known as memory T cells, researchers reported February 14 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.
A single engineered memory T cell was enough to replenish the infection-fighting ability of mice lacking T cells, said Dirk Busch, an immunologist at the Technical University of Munich. That finding indicates that very low numbers of the cells in the body could be enough to protect human patients from maladies ranging from infections to cancer.