Temporary changes to T cells may empower new treatments for cancer and autoimmune disease, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Let’s say I take one type of immune cell from your blood, grow it in a lab and use a virus to cause changes in that cell so it recognizes cancer. Then I put it back in your body to treat your disease. That’s a short course on CAR-Ts, and now a new technique developed by Jordan Green, a biomedical engineering expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues may soon render the whole process much quicker and less expensive.

Green: This is unlike conventional CAR-T outside the body where a virus is used to engineer those cells in a genetically long term way. With our transient mRNA approach here the T cells that we're targeting will express that mRNA for a short period of time and then that mRNA's gone. By having the T cells express that mRNA for a short period of time it gives them special armament so now they can fight disease in a targeted way.   :27

Green says such an approach would likely need to be repeated over time, but that it might also be used to target autoimmune diseases such as lupus, where the body attacks its own cells. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.