The Blogs: From Lab to Life: Chinese Cancer Breakthrough | Shlomo Maital

A potential breakthrough in cancer treatment is emerging from research focused on harnessing the power of the body’s own immune system. Scientists are working to improve CAR-NK therapy – a process that engineers natural killer (NK) cells to target and destroy cancer cells – but scaling up production has been a significant hurdle. Now, a team led by Prof. Jinyong Wang at the Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has demonstrated a promising new approach.

Understanding CAR-NK Therapy

Natural killer cells are a crucial part of our immune defense, providing a rapid response to viruses and cancer. CAR-NK therapy involves attaching a lab-created receptor, called a CAR, to these NK cells. This CAR allows the cells to recognize specific antigens – markers that identify foreign or hostile substances, including cancer cells – and eliminate them. Similar to CAR-NK therapy, chimeric antigen receptor CAR T cells are a patient’s own T cells engineered to recognize and kill cancer cells, functioning as a “living drug” for certain blood cancers.

The Challenge of Production

Despite its potential, CAR-NK therapy has faced challenges in large-scale production. Manufacturing these specialized, cancer-killing NK cells has proven difficult, costly, and time-consuming, limiting its accessibility to patients.

A New Approach Using Umbilical Cord Blood

Prof. Wang’s team has found a way to generate both lab-created NK cells and CAR-engineered NK cells using stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood. Cord blood is known to be a rich source of these valuable stem cells. The results of their work were published in Nature Biomedical Engineering (Hu, F., Li, J., Wang, Y., Lin, Y., Zhang, J., Xu, J., & Wang, J. (2025). Large-scale generation of iNK and CAR-iNK cells from CD34+ haematopoietic stem and progenitor cells for adoptive immunotherapy. Nature biomedical engineering, 1-20).

Did You Know? Umbilical cord blood is a readily available source of stem cells, offering a potential advantage in scaling up the production of CAR-NK therapies.

Expert Insight: The difficulty in scaling up production has been a major impediment to wider adoption of CAR-NK therapies. A more efficient and cost-effective method, like the one proposed by Prof. Wang’s team, could significantly broaden access to this promising treatment.

The Potential for Collaboration

The research highlights a broader point about the potential for scientific collaboration even amidst geopolitical tensions. The current international climate is marked by increasing hostility between the US and China, but the authors suggest that continued research and even tacit coordination between scientists from both countries could yield significant benefits for global health. A jointly developed cure for blood cancers, they posit, could save millions of lives.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are NK cells?

NK cells, or natural killer cells, are cells generated by our immune systems that provide early, rapid protection against viruses and cancer.

What is CAR-NK therapy?

CAR-NK therapy involves attaching a lab-created receptor (CAR) to an NK cell, allowing it to recognize and destroy cancer cells.

Where did the stem cells used in this research come from?

The stem cells used by Prof. Wang’s team were derived from blood collected from the umbilical cord.

Could increased international scientific collaboration lead to faster advancements in cancer treatment and other critical health areas?