Immune cells engineered to attack tumours can also be used to deliver cancer-fighting proteins.

T cells that have been engineered to recognize tumours have shown promise as treatments for certain blood cancers. Hans-Guido Wendel at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Karin Tarte of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Rennes and their colleagues took that engineering a step further. The team found that loss of HVEM — a gene that is often mutated in some types of lymphoma — fosters lymphoma development in mice.

Injecting a key domain of the normal HVEM protein directly into mouse lymphoma tumours blocked their growth. The authors then engineered T cells to produce the protein and deliver it to the cancer cells, treatment that prevented tumour growth in a mouse model of lymphoma.

Cell http://doi.org/brbd (2016)