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Engineered immune cells called CAR Ts that can seek out and destroy B cells have transformed the treatment of some blood cancers, and are raising hopes for possible cures for autoimmune diseases. But these living cell therapies — made by harvesting cells from patients, laboriously growing and engineering them in a lab to express a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR), and then re-infusing them into patients — are hard to make, difficult to deliver to patients and expensive. Could gene therapy tools that can turn immune cells into CAR carriers, directly in the body, be the solution?
