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CAR-T cell therapies are transforming the treatment of previously incurable blood cancers, but a large proportion of patients still responds only poorly or not at all to them, calling for new strategies to overcome this challenge. Now, a research team has developed a simple intervention in the form of a biodegradable scaffold material called 'T-cell enhancing scaffolds' (TES) that can be locally injected under the skin and used to restimulate CAR-T cells after their administration. This increased their therapeutic efficacy and significantly curbed tumor growth and prolonged animal survival in ...

For the first time, researchers from the&nbsp;Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University,&nbsp;Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences&nbsp;(SEAS), and&nbsp;Genentech<u>, a member of the Roche Group,</u>&nbsp;found a way to enhance and extend LN expansion, and study how this phenomenon affects both the immune system and efficacy of vaccinations against tumors. While the oversized LNs maintained a normal tissue organization, they displayed altered&nbsp;mechanical features&nbsp;and hosted higher nu...

Each one of us has around 600 lymph nodes (LNs) – small, bean-shaped organs that house various types of blood cells and filter lymph fluid – scattered throughout our bodies.

<p>Hydrogels are already used in clinical practice for the delivery of drugs, and as lenses, bone cement, wound dressings, 3D scaffolds in tissue engineering and other applications. However, bonding different hydrogel polymers to one another has remained a challenge; yet it could enable numerous new applications. Now, Harvard Wyss and SEAS researchers pioneered a new method that uses a thin film of chitosan, a fibrous sugar-based material derived from the processed outer skeletons of shellfish, to make different hydrogels instantaneously and strongly stick to each other. They used their ...

<p>We all know someone who&#39;s had a head injury that was &quot;only&quot; a concussion, but even mild traumatic brain injuries can cause lasting damage, and the vast majority are never diagnosed. A team led by Samir Mitragotri at the Wyss Institute, Harvard SEAS, and Boston Children&#39;s Hospital&nbsp;created a way to diagnose mild TBIs (mTBIs) even when MRI scans showed nothing, using the body&#39;s own immune cells called macrophages. They attached microparticle &quot;backpacks&quot; containing a common MRI contrast agent to the cells, which migrated...