Everyone seems to love carbon nanotubes. They're always in the news for their potential applications in Making Better Solar Panels, Manipulating Cell Membranes, Looking Inside Mouse Brains, and Making Black Stuff That's More Black Than Usual.
Scientists at Yale are using them to cultivate a cancer patient's immune cells to better fight cancer, so that the enhanced cells can be "injected back into a patient’s blood to boost the immune response or fight cancer".
From the article:
Over the span of 14 days, the number of T cells cultured on the composite nanosystem expanded by a factor of 200, according to the researchers. Also, the method required 1,000 times less Interleukin-2 than conventional culture conditions.
[...]
"In repressing the body’s immune response, tumors are like a castle with a moat around it," says Tarek Fahmy, an associate professor of biomedical engineering and the study’s principal investigator. "Our method recruits significantly more cells to the battle and arms them to become superkillers."
(Score: 3, Informative) by Joe on Tuesday August 19 2014, @03:34PM
The carbon nanotubes increases the surface area for the immobilized Interleukin-2 (IL-2, a T-cell growth factor), which increases its interaction with T-cells that are grown on the surface (better than just putting it in the culture medium). This is great step in the right direction, but it really isn't going to drop the cost of these types of therapies in a substantial way.
The castle/moat analogy isn't really accurate, since tumors don't rely on keeping T-cells out at the therapeutic intervention stage of disease. Tumors have open borders and convince/bribe/trick T-cells into switching to their side (converting into regulatory T-cells that suppress the immune system) or ignoring the cancer. Future anti-cancer T-cell therapies will probably have built-in "Suk Imperial Conditioning" to keep them faithful and make sure this doesn't happen.
-Joe