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Last September, a group of 27 researchers led by scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas published a paper in Nature reporting a new technique that would allow immune cells to cross the blood-brain barrier and home in on hard-to-reach brain tumors. After garnering more than 50 comments on the anonymous post-publication peer-review website PubPeer, the article was retracted today (February 20).
In the paper, oncologist Nabil Ahmed, Heba Samaha, a research associate at Children’s Cancer Hospital Egypt 57357 who worked at Baylor for several years, and colleagues revealed a potential solution for the difficult task of getting the immune cells used in immunotherapy to brain cancers. The researchers reported that by engineering T cells with a “homing system” to bind firmly to molecules on the surface blood vessels—and adding a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) that could identify cancer cells—they were able to ...
