Cornell biomedical engineers have developed specialized white blood cells - dubbed "super natural killer cells" - that seek out cancer cells in lymph nodes with only one purpose: destroy them. This breakthrough halts the onset of metastasis, according to a new Cornell study published this month in the journal Biomaterials.
"We want to see lymph node metastasis become a thing of the past," said Michael R. King, the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Biomedical Engineering and senior author of the paper, "Super Natural Killer Cells That Target Metastases in the Tumor Draining Lymph Nodes".
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Engineers Develop 'Killer Cells' to Destroy Cancer in Lymph Nodes
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @12:45AM
and we're all dead!
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday November 16 2015, @01:17AM
but living..... dum dum dum!!
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday November 16 2015, @01:52PM
Well, that's where cancer comes from in the first place. So at least you're buying time.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday November 16 2015, @01:12AM
I just had a lymph node cut out of my neck with cancerous cells in it, so I guess I'm at risk for it happening again. I hope they get this treatment perfected soon.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday November 16 2015, @01:42AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday November 17 2015, @02:06AM
Thanks. :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @02:24AM
The main finding is shown in figure 3A. We see that according to that data the tumors did not grow, but stayed pretty much the same size when given their treatment. This is not consistent with the idea that they are targeting the tumor cells for destruction. There is also the usual no mention of blinding, nor anything about the "in-house developed region of interest (ROI) measurement" they use to determine tumor size.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @05:37AM
Haven't checked the paper but other cancer immunotherapies take a long time to reduce tumor size. Some actually increase due to infiltrating immune cells.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 16 2015, @09:20AM
Thanks, I'm not sure about this case though. The tumor cells were expressing luciferase, they measured photons and used that as a proxy the tumor size according to a secret method. There are some other strange figures in there showing it applied to ex vivo lymph nodes that make me question this method, but anyway they need to discuss this issue.