New 'off-the-shelf' pancreatic cancer therapy able to hunt down tumors: study

Scientists at UCLA have developed an “off-the-shelf” cell-based immunotherapy that was able to track down and kill pancreatic cancer cells even after they had spread to other organs.

In a mouse study, the treatment slowed cancer growth, extended survival and remained effective even within the harsh environment of solid tumors.

“Even when the cancer tries to evade one attack pathway by changing its molecular signature, our therapy is hitting it from multiple other angles at the same time. The tumor simply can’t adapt fast enough,” lead author Dr. Yanruide Li, a post-doctoral scholar at UCLA, said in a press release.

To build the therapy, researchers took human stem cells and turned them into a special type of immune cell called an invariant natural killer T cell (NKT cell).

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