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 language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 237-239 |
Number of pages | 3 |
Journal | Journal of Molecular Cell Biology |
Volume | 2 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2010 |