Smart proteins make macrophages better cancer-eating machines

The big blue cells are macrophages and the green/yellow dots are Toledo tumor cells. Top panels: macrophages engineered with iSNAPS rapidly engulf and clear out cancer cells. Bottom panels: cancer cells get stuck on top of control macrophages.

A team of researchers has engineered smart protein molecules that can reprogram white blood cells to ignore a self-defense signaling mechanism that cancer cells use to survive and spread in the body. Researchers say the advance could lead to a new method of re-engineering immune cells to fight cancer and infectious diseases. The team successfully tested this method in a live cell culture system.

The work was led by bioengineering professors Peter Yingxiao Wang and Shu Chien with collaborating professors Victor Nizet and Xiangdong Xu, all at the University of California San Diego, along with researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The team published their work this month in Nature Communications.

Press release: http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/new...