Adoptive cell therapy (ACT) has become a promising immunotherapy, which uses immune cells collected from patients' own tumors to help treat advanced melanoma. American and Canadian scientists published a paper in the latest issue of Nature biomedical engineering, saying that they found for the first time that cells that can deal with tumors can be non-invasive isolated from patients' blood rather than tumors. This achievement opened the door to the use of ACT to treat difficult and miscellaneous diseases. The latest research is based on a study published in the same journal last year by the Shana Kelly team at Northwestern University. In previous studies, Kelly's team treated mice with immune cells collected from a tumor, which significantly reduced the tumor size compared to traditional cell therapy. The 2022 paper also introduced in detail the new method used to isolate and proliferate tumor infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL), including immune cells T cells, NK cells, etc. This method can recover 400% more cells than the current method, thus enhancing the anti-cancer response of cells. The researchers found TIL in melanoma through excision and treatment. However, removing tumors to obtain TIL poses a huge risk to patients, making it impossible to use ACT to combat multiple types of cancer. In the latest study, scientists discovered TIL like lymphocytes in animal blood: circulating tumor reactive lymphocytes (cTRL), and then tested the ability of cTRL and TIL to kill tumor cells. The results were surprisingly similar. Moreover, cTRL not only exists in melanoma models, but also in colon cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer. Each tumor expresses a unique feature that binds to TIL. Kelly pointed out that this new breakthrough raises some exciting questions: when does cTRL appear in the blood? Can these cells be used for early diagnosis and treatment of cancer? Answering these questions is expected to open up new avenues for cell therapy. (New News Agency)