Turning the table on CD47, Penn team primes macrophages to ignore 'don't eat me' signal
The growing group of biotechs pursuing the CD47 “don’t eat me” pathway has largely focused on disrupting how the immunosuppressant lulls macrophages into sleep, thereby helping cancer skirt the immune system. But a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania now wants to focus on the other side of the interaction, arming macrophages to do the hit job they’d been kept from doing.
By rewiring the metabolism of macrophages — a type of immune cells capable of engulfing cancer cells — one can override the “don’t eat me” signal and unleash an immune attack, the researchers reported in a Nature Immunology paper published on Monday.
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