A team of cancer researchers, led by the University of Houston, has discovered a new subset of T cells that may improve the outcome for patients treated with T-cell therapies. T cell-based immunotherapy has tremendous value to fight, and often eliminate, cancer. The strategy activates a patient's immune system and engineers a patient's own T cells to recognize, attack and kill cancer cells.
In this way, the body's own T cells become living drugs. While T-cell immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment, there is still much to learn. Unfortunately, not all patients respond to these therapies, so a better understanding of the properties of engineered T cells is necessary to improve clinical responses.
One such study, supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, is reported in Nature Cancer by the laboratory of Navin Varadarajan, M.D. Anderson Professor in the William A.
Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The study uses the patented TIMING (Timelapse Imaging Microscopy in Nanowell Grids) approach which applies visual AI to evaluate cell behavior, movement and ability to kill. "Our results showed that a subset of T cells, labeled as CD8-fit T cells, are capable of high motility and serial killing, found uniquely in patients with clinical response," reports first author and recent UH graduate Ali Rezvan in Nature Cancer .
In addition to the UH team, collaborators include Sattva Neelapu and Harjeet Singh, The University of Texas MD.
