Cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream have something of a homing instinct, able to find and return to the tumor where they originated.
To capitalize on that ability, researchers engineered these roving tumor cells to secrete a protein that triggers a death switch in resident tumor cells they encounter.
Previous research has used circulating tumor cells to deliver cancer-killing viruses to noncirculating tumor cells, for example.
Cells on the move When circulating tumor cells (green) that are engineered with CRISPR to kill other tumor cells are injected into a mouse, they migrate over time to established tumor cells (red), as seen in these fluorescence photomicrographs.
First, researchers hunted for a protein that could trigger cell death in many types of cancer cells.
The winning candidate, a protein called S-TRAIL, killed off a variety of cancer cells and wasn’t particularly toxic to healthy cells.
Researchers used CRISPR to edit genes in these tumor cells to make them produce lots of S-TRAIL, and then set the cells loose on cancer cells that were sensitive to the deadly protein. »
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