Cell therapies articles from across Nature Portfolio

Neurointestinal diseases cause significant morbidity and effective treatments are lacking. Here, authors perform autologous cell transplantation of enteric neural stem cells in a mouse model of colonic aganglionosis and report restoration of colonic contractile activity.

This Review explores the potential of emerging RNA-based technologies and cell-engineering strategies, including those that incorporate small interfering RNA, microRNA, mRNA and synthetic receptor-mediated gene editing, to provide innovative and targeted approaches to osteoarthritis therapy.

The challenge of designing chimeric antigen receptor (CAR)-T cells for cancer therapy is not limited to finding targetable cellular proteins, but also in optimising the effector properties. Here authors show that single-chain variable fragment targeting moieties could unpredictably prompt spontaneous CAR-T cell activation via CAR clustering, which argues for empirical screening for tonic signalling.

Cardiac progenitor cell-derived extracellular vesicles (EVs) are characterized by proteomics and found to induce angiogenesis in a manner dependent on both EV-associated and co-isolated proteins, including Pappalysin-1.

MEGA is a new CRISPR-based RNA-editing platform with the ability to enhance the fitness of CAR T cells; it may also overcome certain limitations of conventional DNA-targeting CRISPR–Cas9 systems.

Using CAR T cells to treat solid tumors is notoriously challenging, but a new study shows impressive responses rates in children with high-risk neuroblastoma.

Findings from the DREAM-HF trial, the largest clinical trial of cell therapy in heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) to date, suggest that cardiac therapy with mesenchymal precursor cells might benefit patients with HFrEF, particularly those with inflammation.