HOUSTON – Inside a lab at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, scientists like Dr. Cassian Yee want to figure out how they can manipulate T cells to protect from cancer.
“We’ve been studying T cells as a form of treatment for cancer for more than 20 years,” explained Dr. Yee.
What do T cells do?
“T cells are a type of white blood cell in your immune system and they’re responsible for fighting viruses,” Dr. Yee explained. “T cells are sometimes called killer T cells because they recognize, and they kill the tumor.”
The T cells are a bit of a mystery in medicine because some T cells hold memory and help your body fight threats long term but how and why that memory develops isn’t fully understood... and the idea of provoking the memory is intriguing.
“The one thing we cannot do on earth that we can do in space is to use gravity as a lever to influence the direction in which these T cells take as a final path towards memory or exhaustion,” Dr. Yee said.
Therefore, the effort to gain new insights in cancer treatments is going to space. The conditions in space may unlock discoveries Yee can’t achieve on earth.
“There have been a lot of experiments have been done to simulate microgravity on earth with random positioning machines or even violent flying or even flying the T cells in parabolic flight to simulate gravity for short periods of time. But in order to influence the differentiation path that T cells take to become memory, you actually have to subject them to the influence of microgravity for longer periods of time,” Yee said.
NASA says it’s a launch! Yee and his team are preparing to one day send T cells to space and hoping the results are out of this world.
“If we can make memory cells, then we can give patients long lasting T cells that will continue to fight cancer and to prevent it from relapsing,” Yee said. “I think that the promise of immunotherapy is that you can fight cancer in a more specific way with less toxicity than you might get from chemotherapy, radiation and so on.”
This project is supported by a grant awarded by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which manages the ISS national laboratory. Dr. Yee says it’s in an effort to study science in a way that will benefit humans on earth.