USC Creates Renewable Cancer-Fighting Immune Cells — SkimNews
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- USC Keck School of Medicine researchers, led by corresponding author Qi-Long Ying with first author Shi Yue, showed that granulocyte-monocyte progenitors (GMPs) can be expanded in the lab while retaining their ability to develop into functioning immune cells
- The team engineered the GMPs with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) to recognize cancer markers, then added an immune-activating signal that remained effective even when donor cells did not match the recipient — pointing toward off-the-shelf cell therapies
- Stanford University's Ravi Majeti independently replicated the GMP expansion and engineering method, providing outside validation of the technique's reliability
- In mouse experiments, the engineered GMPs settled into bone marrow, kept generating tumor-fighting macrophages and other immune cells in vivo, and slowed progression of both blood cancers and solid tumors
- The study, published in Cell, challenges the prevailing view that long-term self-renewal in the blood system is exclusive to hematopoietic stem cells, placing that capability in progenitor cells under the right culture conditions
Why it matters: Mature macrophage therapies are throttled by two problems attested in the source: the cells are hard to multiply outside the body and they disappear rapidly after infusion. Working upstream at the GMP stage gives researchers a renewable, engineerable starting population that can manufacture fresh tumor-fighting cells from inside the patient's bone marrow, which addresses the manufacturing and persistence bottlenecks that have limited macrophage-based cancer immunotherapy.
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