New light-activated method targets cancer and inflammatory cells with precision

University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignJul 1 2024

Usually treatments for cancer use pharmacological induction to kill the cells, but those chemicals tend to diffuse throughout the tissues and it's hard to contain to a precise location. You get a lot of unwanted effects. We can make the cells responsive to light, and we can focus the light beam to be smaller than one cell. That is how we can use light to very precisely target a cell and turn on its death pathway.

However, killing the cell itself is not the only goal. Inducing the inflammatory cell death pathway, rather than outright killing the cell mechanically or chemically, triggers the immune system to respond. The ruptured cells release chemicals called cytokines that irritate nearby cells and attract T cells, white blood cells that play an important role in how the immune system identifies and attacks threats, Zhang said.

Since the optogenetic system requires light delivery directly to tissues, human clinical applications in tissues deeper than skin are currently limited. However, the Illinois group plans to implement their system in mice next to further study necroptosis and immune response in cancer and other inflammatory diseases. They also will further investigate the in vitro platform's potential for training T cells for immune therapies.

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