WIKIMEDIA, AXELBOLDT.Therapeutic transfer of virus-specific T cells to immunocompromised patients can help battle life-threatening infections, but the process for generating such cells is lengthy and laborious. A paper published today (June 25) in Science Translational Medicine, however, suggests a speedy alternative. Ten days in culture was all it took for researchers to generate multivirus-specific T cells that, when transferred into transplant patients, could wipe out multiple infections at once.
“Making T cells for therapy has always been a nightmare,” said John Barrett, an expert in allogenic stem cell transplants from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the study. “The importance of this [new] approach is that it is a little bit simpler and more rapid to generate these T cells . . . and that is actually a practical breakthrough,” he said. “As a step towards making a product that could be widely available, it is very exciting.”
In the months following a bone marrow transplant, before the immune system has regenerated, patients are “wide open to infection with viruses,” said Ann Leen, a professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, ...
