Researchers in the laboratory are generating anti-tumor immune cells.

The University of Coimbra in Portugal recently issued a press release stating that an international research team they are involved with has successfully reprogrammed immune cells with anti-tumor properties in the laboratory using cellular reprogramming techniques, providing a new direction for developing novel cell immunotherapy methods. Cellular reprogramming technology has significant potential in immunotherapy. Through cellular reprogramming, one type of cell can be transformed into a completely different type, generating immune cells for immunotherapy. Transcription factors are key proteins that drive cell reprogramming, but the combination of transcription factors that can reprogram immune cells is mostly unknown. To further understand these critical factors, a research team composed of the Neuroscience and Cell Biology Center of the University of Coimbra and institutions such as Lund University in Sweden developed a research platform called REPROcode. This platform established a database containing over 400 transcription factors, each with a unique "barcode" to track which transcription factors can drive the reprogramming of different types of immune cells. The results showed that the researchers successfully reprogrammed "natural killer cells" in the laboratory using specific combinations of transcription factors, which are immune cells at the forefront of tumor defense. This result validates the use of the REPROcode platform for discovering new immune cell reprogramming strategies.