Engineering the Immune System to Kill Senescent Cells with Corina Amor Vegas

Hundreds of iterations of immune cells that are engineered to kill cancer have already been designed. Corina reached outside of this box to use the same synthetic biology principles to engineer T cells to attack senescent cells, a cell type that contributes to diseases of aging.  Corina walks us through how her engineered T cells know the difference between a diseased cell and healthy tissue, how she stumbled upon the chimeric antigen receptor that made this possible, and how these new T cells are being moved from academia to the clinic.

About the Author

• Corina is a physician scientist who performed this work under Professor Scott Lowe at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. Dr. Lowe and his team are world experts in dissecting how functional changes in a cell make them go from healthy to cancerous.
• Corina became fascinated with translation biotechnology after seeing her mother survive a life threatening disease using a new therapy in a clinical trial.

Key Takeaways

• T cells are the part of the immune system that have the ability to target and kill other cells in the body in a way similar to drug sniffing dogs.
• Using the hottest tool in synthetic immunology, the chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), T cells can be engineered to target and attack almost anything we like.
• A major hurdle to engineering these cells is finding something to target that is overrepresented in disease cells and virtually absent in healthy cells.
• When targeted to senescent cells, these T cells can kill precancerous cells and reverse diseases related to aging and poor diet.

Translation

• Corina’s research contains excellent demonstrations of these cells working in preclinical models -- mice that mimic human diseases.
• To move to human trials, Corina must update the therapy to attack human versions of the cells and begin to work toward understanding its safety and efficacy.
• Corina believes the best people to take on this challenge are the researchers who have intimate knowledge of the method and who care deeply about the disease it could cure.

First Author: Corina Amor Vegas

Paper: Senolytic CAR T cells reverse senescence-associated pathologies. Nature, 2020.

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