Wake Forest researchers have reprogrammed macrophages to target metastatic tumors in the brain, offering a potential new approach where conventional therapies struggle.
Brain metastases are a growing and urgent problem in cancer care. Up to 30 percent of patients with lung, breast, or melanoma cancers will develop brain metastases, where treatment options are limited, and prognosis is poor. Surgery is often risky, radiation offers only modest control, and most drugs simply cannot cross the brain’s protective blood-brain barrier. For patients and their families, a diagnosis of brain metastasis remains a grim turning point.
But a team at Wake Forest University School of Medicine may have found a new way to fight back. In a study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, researchers engineered macrophages into…