Modern Medical Laboratory Journal

In the cutting-edge cancer treatment known as CAR T cell therapy, some of a patient’s immune cells are removed and engineered to express a synthetic CAR receptor that allows the cells to latch onto and destroy cancer cells. With a new method developed in mice, CAR T cells can now be made in vivo, without removing and re-transfusing cells—and then used to treat a very different condition. Cardiac fibrosis is the stiffening and scarring of heart tissue and can be fatal. Rurik et al. designed an immunotherapy strategy to generate transient chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells that can recognize the fibrotic cells in the heart. They developed a therapeutic approach to generate transient antifibrotic chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells in vivo by delivering modified messenger RNA (mRNA) in T cell–targeted lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). The efficacy of these in vivo–reprogrammed CAR T cells was evaluated by injecting CD5-targeted LNPs into a mouse model of heart failure.
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