Joint Breakthrough in Cancer Treatment

A research team led by Professor Park Sung-su from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), in collaboration with Professor Joo Chulmin’s team from Yonsei University, has developed a new technology that can assess in real time the effectiveness of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy, a treatment method for cancer patients. CAR T-cell therapy works by altering the patient’s immune cells so that they directly attack cancer cells. While this treatment has been particularly successful against blood cancers, it has been difficult to apply to solid tumors, as there was no precise technology to measure the effectiveness of the immune cells. To resolve this issue, the research team developed a new image analysis technique based on optical coherence tomography (OCT), a technology originally used to diagnose ophthalmic diseases. With this technique, it is now possible to precisely measure the effectiveness of immune cells in removing cancer cells by analyzing how much light is absorbed and scattered inside the cancer cells. When the research team conducted a comparison experiment between chemotherapy drugs and CAR T-cell therapy in a tumor model made from breast cancer cells to test the new technology, results showed that CAR T-cells killed cancer cells twice as quickly within just 12 hours, as observed through light wave analysis. With this breakthrough, cancer treatments no longer have to rely on inserting fluorescent substances or destroying tissues and can become more accurate and non-invasive for the body.