A new twist on a decades-old anticancer strategy has shown powerful effects against multiple cancer types in a preclinical study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The experimental approach, which uses tiny capsules called small extracellular vesicles (sEVs), could offer an innovative new type of immunotherapy treatment and is poised to move toward more advanced development and testing.
Today in Science Advances, the researchers describe how they used sEVs, which are engineered in the lab from human cells, to target a cell-surface receptor called DR5 (death receptor 5) that many tumor cells have. When activated, DR5 can trigger the death of these cells by a self-destruct process called apoptosis. Researchers have been trying for more than 20 years…