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".
(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.