Spilling the CAR-T on Cardiac Fibrosis

Beyond the Abstract

Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy has revolutionized cancer treatment by engineering our own immune cells to recognize and fight cancers that are resistant to treatments like radiation and chemotherapy. But can we use CAR T cells to treat other diseases too, like cardiac fibrosis? Cardiac fibrosis, or scarring of the heart, is common following heart attacks or prolonged hypertension. At some point, many patients require heart transplants. In this episode of Beyond the Abstract, Dan and Derek discuss how scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have created a new, cell-based therapy to fight against this scarring in the heart by taking a few tricks from the fields of cancer biology and immunology.

Aghajanian et al. Targeting cardiac fibrosis with engineered T cells. Nature, September 2019. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1546-z. PMID: 31511695.

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