Temporary changes to T cells may empower new treatments for cancer and autoimmune disease, Elizabeth Tracey reports

Let's say I take one type of immune cell from your blood, grow it in a lab, and use

a virus to cause changes in that cell so it recognizes cancer.

Then I put it back in your body to treat your disease.

That's a short course on CARTs and now a new technique developed by Jordan Green, a biomedical

engineering expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues may soon render the whole process

much quicker and less expensive.

This is unlike conventional CART outside the body where a virus is used to engineer

those cells in a genetically long-term way.

With our transient mRNA approach here, the T cells that we're targeting will express

that mRNA for a short period of time, and then that mRNA is gone.

It gives them special armament, so now they can fight disease in a targeted way.

Green says such an approach would likely need to be repeated over time, but that it might

also be used to target autoimmune diseases such as lupus.

At Johns Hopkins, I'm Elizabeth Tracey.