Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have developed a new way to grow T cells in the lab that enables them to live longer and better destroy cancer cells in a mouse model of melanoma compared to those grown in traditional growth media.
The findings, published recently in Cell Metabolism, have the potential to greatly improve the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapies that involve taking T cells from a patient and growing them to enormous numbers in the lab before reinfusing them back into the body.
“The way we traditionally grow T cells in the lab is horribly inefficient,” said senior author Dr. Greg Delgoffe, professor in the Department of Immunology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and director of the Tumor Microenvironment Center at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center. “We make millions of T cells and we infuse them back into a patient, but most of the cells die. Our research is uncovering new ways to manufacture T cells that live for a long time with the goal of making cell therapies more effective.”
Cell therapy is a type of treatment that involves removing immune cells from the patient, expanding them in a dish and transferring these living cells back into the patient. Common forms of cell therapy that use T cells-the immune system’s soldiers that fight infections and cancers-include chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T), which are T cells modified to better target cancer, and tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy, which uses naturally occurring T cells that can fight the