{"id":223256,"date":"2025-10-11T03:03:37","date_gmt":"2025-10-11T08:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/engineered-stem-cells-yield-millions-of-tumor-fighting-natural-killer-cells-at-reduced-cost"},"modified":"2025-10-11T03:03:37","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T08:03:37","slug":"engineered-stem-cells-yield-millions-of-tumor-fighting-natural-killer-cells-at-reduced-cost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/engineered-stem-cells-yield-millions-of-tumor-fighting-natural-killer-cells-at-reduced-cost","title":{"rendered":"Engineered stem cells yield millions of tumor-fighting natural killer cells at reduced cost"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/engineered-stem-cells-yield-millions-of-tumor-fighting-natural-killer-cells-at-reduced-cost2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Chinese researchers have developed a novel method to efficiently engineer natural killer (NK) cells for cancer immunotherapy. NK cells are central to early antiviral and anticancer defense\u2014among other immune system roles\u2014making them well-suited for cancer immunotherapy. For example, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-NK therapy involves adding a lab-built receptor (a CAR) to an NK cell, enabling it to recognize a specific antigen on a cancer cell and attack it.<\/p>\n<p>However, conventional CAR-NK immunotherapies rely primarily on mature NK cells isolated from <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/human+tissues\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">human tissues<\/a>, such as peripheral blood or cord blood, which poses multiple challenges, including high heterogeneity, low engineering efficiency, high handling costs, and time-intensive processing.<\/p>\n<p>Now a research team led by Prof. Wang Jinyong from the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a novel method to generate induced (that is, lab-generated) NK (iNK) cells and CAR-engineered iNK (CAR-iNK) cells from CD34<sup>+<\/sup> <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/hematopoietic+stem\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">hematopoietic stem<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/progenitor+cells\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">progenitor cells<\/a> (HSPCs) derived from cord blood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chinese researchers have developed a novel method to efficiently engineer natural killer (NK) cells for cancer immunotherapy. NK cells are central to early antiviral and anticancer defense\u2014among other immune system roles\u2014making them well-suited for cancer immunotherapy. For example, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-NK therapy involves adding a lab-built receptor (a CAR) to an NK cell, enabling [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223256","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=223256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223256\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}