This company is working towards perfecting cellular reprogramming
by Arkadi Mazin – Lifespan.io
Turn.bio, a developer of mRNA-based cellular reprogramming technologies, has announced preliminary results from its current trial. The announcement was made by the company’s co-founder, Prof. Vittorio Sebastiano, at the New Frontiers of RNA Nanotherapeutics conference at Houston Methodist Research Institute. These results show that the company’s proprietary Epigenetic Reprogramming of Aging (ERA) technology greatly increases the fitness of CAR-T cells, which are widely used in modern immunotherapy.
T cell exhaustion is a big problem
CAR stands for “chimeric antigen receptor”, and CAR-T cells are genetically engineered to be able to bypass cancer cells’ anti-immune defenses. However, according to Sebastiano, “the primary bottleneck that’s crippling CAR-T immunotherapy is that due to the manufacturing process and the toxicity of the tumor microenvironment in vivo, the cells experience exhaustion.” This exhaustion leads to decreased viability and proliferation and greatly impairs T cells’ anti-cancer potential.
