New technology can track antitumor immune cells

The immunotherapy of using human immune cells to attack cancer cells is the current international scientific research focus, but how specific immune cells in-vivo action has always been a mystery. US researchers have recently developed a new method using recombinant mouse proteins for the first time to achieve the body's immune cell location and surveillance.

At this stage, immunotherapy still has its limitations. The effect of immune cells to find and kill cancer cells sometimes is better than conventional cancer therapy, but sometimes it does not work. Doctors often have to wait a few months to check whether the tumor shrinks to know whether the immune cells attack cancer cells. If immunotherapy does not work, then the cancer cells may have spread or become more difficult to deal with.

Researchers at Stanford University and other researchers said in the online version of the US academic journal Science Translational Medicine that they spent 10 years to find a way to track immune cells.

They have genetically engineered immune cells from patients and added a "reporter gene", a gene that directs the synthesis of a protein that can be detected by positron emission tomography. After injecting genetically-modified immune cells back to the human body, we can know the location of immune cells, the number of information by detecting the relevant proteins to analyse whether they are close to the tumor and attack.

The researchers successfully tested this technique in glioblastoma patients. New technologies can also be used to track immune cells against other cancers.

"The technique, which can show how the living body's immune system works without removing any human tissue, is unprecedented," says professor Sanjff Gambier at Stanford University who led the study.

He introduced, "Immune cell imaging technology also brings a windfall. In one patient's test, some immune cells arrived in the tumor region of the patient's brain, but some of the immune cells went to another region of the brain, where a positron emission tomography revealed a second tumor that had not previously been found."

The researchers said that this can locate the immune cells to see whether it attacks cancer cells and help doctors to assess the effectiveness of immunotherapy for cancer patients and analyze its causes. Flarebio offers high-quality recombinant proteins including recombinant ECE1.