{"id":204151,"date":"2025-01-21T00:25:24","date_gmt":"2025-01-21T06:25:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/re-engineered-blue-light-activated-immune-cells-penetrate-and-kill-solid-tumors"},"modified":"2025-01-21T00:25:24","modified_gmt":"2025-01-21T06:25:24","slug":"re-engineered-blue-light-activated-immune-cells-penetrate-and-kill-solid-tumors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/01\/re-engineered-blue-light-activated-immune-cells-penetrate-and-kill-solid-tumors","title":{"rendered":"Re-engineered, blue light-activated immune cells penetrate and kill solid tumors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/re-engineered-blue-light-activated-immune-cells-penetrate-and-kill-solid-tumors.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>HERSHEY, Pa. \u2014 Immunotherapies that mobilize a patient\u2019s own immune system to fight cancer have become a treatment pillar. These therapies, including CAR T-cell therapy, have performed well in cancers like leukemias and lymphomas, but the results have been less promising in solid tumors.<\/p>\n<p>A team led by researchers from the Penn State College of Medicine has re-engineered immune cells so that they can penetrate and kill solid tumors grown in the lab. They created a light-activated switch that controls protein function associated with cell structure and shape and incorporated it into natural killer cells, a type of immune cell that fights infections and tumors. When these cells are exposed to blue light, they morph and can then migrate into tumor spheroids \u2014 3D tumors grown in the lab from either mouse or human cell lines \u2014 and kill tumor cells. This novel approach could improve cell-based immunotherapies, the researchers said.<\/p>\n<p>The findings were published today (Oct 23) in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pnas.org\/doi\/10.1073\/pnas.2405717121\">Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/a>. The researchers also filed a provisional application to patent the technology described in the paper.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>HERSHEY, Pa. \u2014 Immunotherapies that mobilize a patient\u2019s own immune system to fight cancer have become a treatment pillar. These therapies, including CAR T-cell therapy, have performed well in cancers like leukemias and lymphomas, but the results have been less promising in solid tumors. A team led by researchers from the Penn State College of [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-204151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}