Researchers engineer a herpes virus to turn on T cells for immunotherapy
Herpes Virus Proteins May Boost Immunotherapy’s Cancer Fighting Role
A team at teh University of Michigan is exploring how proteins from the herpes virus might enhance the effectiveness of immunotherapy in fighting cancer. Their research focuses on repurposing the virus’s ability to manipulate cellular machinery to strengthen the body’s immune response.
T cells, critical in battling viruses and cancer, can eliminate infected or malignant cells. Scientists have long sought methods to direct these immune cells more effectively. CAR-T therapy, which uses a patient’s own T cells to attack cancer, is one such approach. However, tumors often create environments that suppress T cell function, limiting their therapeutic potential.
The Michigan team,led by Adam Courtney,Ph.D., at the Department of Pharmacology and the U-M Rogel Cancer Center, identified herpes virus saimiri, which infects squirrel monkey T cells, as a source of proteins that activate pathways promoting T cell survival. Their work investigates whether a modified viral protein could activate STAT proteins,transcription factors known to boost T cell effectiveness.
Yating Zheng, a Ph.D. candidate at U-M Medical School, is the paper’s first author. The team engineered a variant of the tyrosine kinase interacting protein from the herpes virus to bind LCK, a kinase active in resting T cells, and recruit it to activate STAT5.They found that direct activation of STAT5 sustained T cell function in mouse models of melanoma and lymphoma.
These findings suggest that leveraging genes from organisms known to modulate human cells could enhance the power of immunotherapy and improve cancer treatment outcomes.
What’s next
Further research will focus on refining the modified viral protein and testing its efficacy in human clinical trials to determine its potential as a new immunotherapy approach.