USC Scientists Engineer Renewable Cancer-Fighting Cells — SkimNews
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- Qi-Long Ying and colleagues at USC's Keck School of Medicine demonstrated in a study published in Cell that granulocyte-monocyte progenitors (GMPs) — immature immune cells — can self-renew under controlled laboratory conditions while retaining the capacity to generate functional macrophages.
- The team developed a precisely defined chemical mixture that let GMPs multiply extensively in the lab without prematurely maturing into other cell types, with collaborators in Ravi Majeti's Stanford lab independently confirming the expansion and engineering method's reproducibility.
- Researchers genetically engineered the GMPs with a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) to target tumor markers and added an immune-activating signal to recruit T cells, with the signal remaining effective even when donor cells did not match the recipient — raising the possibility of off-the-shelf, donor-derived therapies.
- In mouse experiments, the engineered GMPs seeded into bone marrow, generated new immune cells inside the body, and slowed progression of both blood cancers and solid tumors — the latter being cancers where existing engineered T-cell therapies have had limited success.
- The finding challenges the prevailing view that long-term self-renewal in the blood system is exclusive to hematopoietic stem cells, establishing GMPs as a 'scalable starting point for engineering cell therapies for cancer, infectious disease and potentially many other conditions,' per Ying.
Why it matters: By targeting progenitor cells rather than mature macrophages, USC's platform sidesteps the manufacturing bottlenecks — difficult expansion, genetic modification, freezing damage — that have stalled macrophage immunotherapy clinical trials and opens a path to off-the-shelf donor-derived treatments. Solid tumors, where engineered T cells have struggled, become a concrete target rather than an aspiration.
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