A new avenue to cure cancer by turning adaptive immune T cells to innate immune NK cells via reprogramming

Dong Ming Su, Ramakrishna Vankayalapati

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Thymocytes after T-lineage commitment develop in the T-cell pathway. However, in a recent study, Li et al. (2010) demonstrated that inducing to delete Bcl11b gene in these thymocytes, even in mature T cells turns these cells into natural killer (NK) cells during the culture. They called this conversion 'reprogramming', and the reprogrammed killer cells 'ITNK cells'. The ITNK cells possessed tumor-killer ability and did not indiscriminately kill normal cells. This exciting finding represents a major breakthrough towards curing cancer and identifies an important, novel transcription factor in the thymus development.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)237-239
Number of pages3
JournalJournal of Molecular Cell Biology
Volume2
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010

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