A living drug manages to eliminate tumors in mice with pancreatic, ovarian and kidney cancer

"An ultrasensitive version of CAR-T cell therapy has successfully eliminated human pancreatic, ovarian and kidney cancer tumors implanted in laboratory mice. The lead researcher is the French-Canadian immunologist Michel Sadelain, born in Paris 66 years ago. His team demonstrated in 2003 that CAR-T cells, which target the CD19 protein on the surface of cancer cells, eliminated lymphomas in mice."

"Solid tumors—such as those of the breast, lung, colon, or pancreas—are more heterogeneous and do not display the CD19 protein, which has led to the failure of this strategy over the past two decades. Sadelain's group at Columbia University in New York is proposing a new target: the CD70 protein, characteristic of more than 20 types of solid tumors."

"One of the researchers on the Columbia team, Sophie Hanina, had a hunch: perhaps the CD70 protein was indeed present in all tumor cells, but in some of them at such minute levels that it was undetectable by standard CAR-T cell therapies. Sadelain's team designed an ultrasensitive version of CAR-T cell therapy in 2022, called HIT, capable of detecting cancer cells that had previously gone undetected."

CAR-T cell therapy has achieved thousands of complete remissions in blood cancers since 2010 by extracting and genetically modifying immune cells to destroy cancer cells. However, this approach has failed against solid tumors, which are more heterogeneous and lack the CD19 protein targeted in blood cancers. Researchers at Columbia University, led by Michel Sadelain, developed an ultrasensitive CAR-T therapy called HIT that targets the CD70 protein found in over 20 solid tumor types. The breakthrough came from recognizing that CD70 exists on all tumor cells but at minute levels undetectable by standard therapies. This ultrasensitive version successfully eliminated pancreatic, ovarian, and kidney cancer tumors in laboratory mice.

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