A team of researchers from the Rice Biotech Launch Pad at Rice University has developed an implantable “cytokine factory” that safely triggers potent immune responses against hard-to-treat cancers, including metastatic melanoma, pancreatic and colorectal tumors.
The study, published in The Journal of ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, details how an immunoprotected device near the tumor microenvironment containing cells engineered to locally release interleukin-12 (IL-12) – an “IL-12 cytokine factory” – successfully induces the recruitment of specialized immune cells called precursor exhausted T cells (Tpex cells). This Tpex cell recruitment results in a large, durable population of tumor-targeting T cells with broad molecular profiles, both in isolation and in an enhanced manner when implemented in…