A contagious facial cancer that has ravaged Tasmanian devils in southern Australia isn't the first place one would look to find the key to advancing cell therapies in humans.
But that’s exactly what first inspired a Medicine by Design-funded research team to improve the safety of stem cell-derived treatments by programming the cells to die if they mutate in ways that harm patients. The development of “safe cells,” an advance outlined in a paper published today in Nature, could be a critical step toward the widespread use of cell therapies, which hold the potential to treat and even cure diseases such as heart failure, eye diseases, diabetes and stroke.
“Moving a cell therapy from the lab to the clinic requires answering two important questions: Does it work? And is it safe?” says Andras Nagy, a senior investigator at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute at Sinai Health System and a professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology and the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto. “We believe our ‘safe cells’ help answer the second question and will have a significant impact on the use of stem cells to treat a broad range of diseases.”
Safety in cell therapy involves preventing or mitigating the risk that the cells will develop tumours or unwanted tissues, or trigger an immune response that may jeopardize the health of the patient. It’s a tricky thing to predict, given that cells are living entities.
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Image via University of Toronto.