Advancing safer and more effective cell therapy for solid tumours

Alba Rodríguez

  • PROJECT LEADER

    Alba Rodríguez

  • APPLICANT INSTITUTION
    AND COUNTRY

    Fundació de Recerca Clínic Barcelona - Institut d'Investigacions Biomèdiques August Pi i Sunyer, Barcelona, Spain

  • DESCRIPTION

    Cancer treatments are becoming more personalized, and one promising approach is to use the patient’s own immune cells to fight the disease. In this therapy, doctors collect immune cells from the blood, teach them to recognize and attack cancer cells by altering them in the laboratory, and then return them to the patient’s body. This method has brought great hope, especially for some blood cancers, leading to powerful and lasting responses where other treatments have failed.

    However, most people with solid tumours—cancers that form lumps in organs or tissues—do not benefit as much from this therapy. These tumours have ways to hide or defend themselves from immune attacks, making treatment much harder. Even when the modified immune cells are equipped with extra tools to make them stronger, there is a risk that these tools can also cause unwanted harm elsewhere in the body, leading to serious side effects.

    To solve this problem, this project is developing a new technology that acts like a safety switch. It allows the immune cells to produce helpful substances only when they are inside the tumour, not in other parts of the body. This means the treatment can be more focused on attacking cancer cells and less likely to cause problems elsewhere. The key idea is to use the natural signals inside the cells to control when and where these substances are made.

    This approach promises to make cell therapy safer and more effective for people with solid tumours. By giving doctors a way to control the behaviour of the patient’s own immune cells, this technology could open the door to better treatments for many who currently have few options, turning the body’s own defences into a precise and powerful weapon against cancer.

  • ORIGINAL
    TITLE

    Engineering a technology for site-specific transgene delivery in tumors using tumor-specific T cells

  • PROJECT
    STAGE

    Stage 2