Purifying cells to treat disease
Various cell therapies involve injecting a specific cell type into a patient. These include, for example, bone marrow transplants and some types of immunotherapy that use T-cells (a white blood cell involved in immunity) to help fight cancer. Before cells are transplanted, they need to be purified to reduce the inclusion of unwanted cell types with the therapeutic cells that clinicians and researchers want to use. This process can be inefficient and limited—where all other cell types are not removed—or can damage the cells needed for a transplant, rendering them useless. Many current purification techniques use antibodies that bind to cell surface receptors. Because receptors can be common in many cell types, they don’t necessarily select and isolate only the chosen cells, but leave other unwanted cell types in the final treatment. Hirohide Saito and colleagues at the Center for iPS [induced pluripotent stem] Cell Research and Application at Kyoto University are investigating ...