A faster way to find antibodies that order immune cells to eat lymphoma — even the drug-resistant kind

Some of the best cancer medicines work by flagging tumour cells so the immune system's macrophages — its eater cells — devour them. The problem is finding the right flags among hundreds of candidates. A Harvard Medical School team at Beth Israel Deaconess and Dana-Farber, led by Kipp Weiskopf, built a screening method called tactical surfaceome profiling that tested 414 antibodies for exactly that eat-me signal. Their best engineered two-armed antibody beat the standard drugs rituximab and daratumumab in lab tests, including on cells resistant to rituximab; in mice with aggressive B-cell lymphoma it slowed tumours, extended survival, and with rituximab eliminated some tumours entirely. The work, in Nature Communications, is preclinical — mice, not patients yet — but it hands drug hunters a far faster map.

SDG 3 · Good health and well-being — Mechanism: tech innovation