Painting a Target on Cancer to Make Therapy More Effective
A BME team is putting a synthetic flag on tumors, then engineering a patient’s immune cells to find and eliminate cancer.
Biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech created a treatment that could one day unlock a universal strategy for treating some of the hardest-to-treat cancers — like those in the brain, breast, and colon — by teaching the immune system to see what it usually misses.
Their experimental approach worked against those kinds of cancers in lab tests and didn’t damage healthy tissues. Importantly, it also stopped cancer from returning.
While the therapy is still in early stages of development, it builds on well established, safe technologies, giving the treatment a clearer, quicker path to clinical trials and patient care.
Reported in May in the journal Nature Cancer, their technique is a one-two punch that flags tumor cells so they can be recognized and then eliminated by specially enhanced T cells from the patient’s own immune system.
Citation: Gamboa, L., Zamat, A.H., Thiveaud, C.A. et al. Sensitizing solid tumors to CAR-mediated cytotoxicity by lipid nanoparticle delivery of synthetic antigens. Nat Cancer (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43018-025-00968-5
Funding:This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, grant Nos. DP2-HD091793, DP1-CA280832, 1S10OD016264-01A1, 5T32EB006343, F31-CA271803, and 5T32GM145735; the National Cancer Institute, grant No. R01CA273878; the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, grant No. R01EB032822; the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, grant No. UL1TR000454; the National Science Foundation, grant No. DGE-1451512; the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation; and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.
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Joshua Stewart
Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering