Scientists at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have developed an experimental immunotherapy that takes an unconventional approach to metastatic cancer. Rather than targeting cancer cells directly, the new strategy—which they suggest is akin to that of the Trojan horse—targets the tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs) that protect the tumor and keep the tumor microenvironment (TME) immunosuppressed. The team developed IL-12-producing CAR T cells that directly target and disarm these tumor-associated macrophages, opening the tumor’s gates for the immune system to then enter and wipe out the cancer cells. The researchers demonstrated that the CAR T cell therapy increased survival in aggressive preclinical models of metastatic ovarian and lung cancer, and suggest that results could point to a new strategy for treating advanced-stage solid tumors. “This establishes a new way to treat cancer,” commented Brian Brown, PhD, director of the Icahn Genomics Institute, vice chair of Immunology and Immunotherapy, associate director of the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute, and Mount Sinai professor of Genetic Engineering, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “By targeting tumor macrophages, we’ve shown that it can be possible to eliminate cancers that are refractory to other immunotherapies.” Brown, together with co-senior author Jaime Mateus-Tique, PhD, a faculty member in Immunology and Immunotherapy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and colleagues described the study in Cancer Cell, in a paper titled “Armored macrophage-targeted CAR T cells reset and reprogram the tumor microenvironment and control metastatic cancer growth.” In their…
