Access

News and Views

Nature Medicine 13, 1411–1413 (1 December 2007) | doi:10.1038/nm1207-1411

Building the bionic T cell

Drew M Pardoll

Ever since adoptive T cell transfer studies in mice and then in humans with cancer showed the capacity of tumor-specific T cells to treat established cancers, tumor immunologists have been trying to do to T cells what was done to Steve Austin and Jaime Sommers in The Six Million Dollar Man—namely, engineer them to be better, stronger, faster. For T cells, that engineering is done via gene transfer.