Cancer-Killing Stem Cells Could Be Used To Treat Cancer

Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Stem Cell Research Also Included In: Immune System / Vaccines;Cancer / Oncology Article Date: 05 Jan 2013 - 0:00 PST

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The researchers, from the RIKEN Research Centre for Allergy and Immunology in Yokohama, describe how they created cancer-specific killer T lymphocytes from iPSCs, in a paper published online on 3 January in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

Hiroshi Kawamoto and colleagues started with mature T lymphocytes specific for a certain type of skin cancer and reprogrammed them into IPSCs with the help of "Yamanaka factors". The iPSCs cells then generated fully active, cancer-specific T lymphocytes.

Yamanaka factors are named after Shinya Yamanaka, who with British scientist John B. Gurdon, won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent stem cells.

Yamanaka discovered that treating adult skin cells with four pieces of DNA (the Yamanaka factors) makes them revert back to their pluripotent state, where they have the potential, almost like embryonic stem cells, to become virtually any cell in the body.

"We have succeeded in the expansion of antigen-specific T cells by making iPS cells and differentiating them back into functional T cells."

Previous attempts using conventional methods to make cancer-killing T lymphocytes in the lab have not been very successful. The cells failed to kill the cancer cells, mainly because they did not live long enough.

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Cancer-Killing Stem Cells Could Be Used To Treat Cancer