When cancer-treating acronyms collide

What if you paired the tumor-seeking ability of CAR-T treatment with the immune-stimulating power of a BiTE antibody? The answer, at least for mice with glioblastoma, is a self-perpetuating weapon against cancer.

As STAT’s Sharon Begley reports, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital created custom CAR-T cells equipped with a gene that encodes for a BiTE, short for bi-specific T-cell engager. Lab-made BiTEs are too big to cross the blood-brain barrier, but BiTEs generated by a CAR-T that’s already in the brain have no trouble getting to work on tumors.

This all comes with the colossal caveat that curing cancer in mice offers no guarantees when it comes to treating people, but outside scientists applauded the ingenuity and said they look forward to clinical trials.

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