Immune Fitness Boost

Boosting the body’s immune cells to fight tumours is a growing field of cancer therapy. The use of CAR-T technology – in which a patient’s own T cells are harvested, engineered to recognise the cancer, grown to large numbers, and returned to the patient – being a prime example. But some cancers, including colorectal tumours can develop resistance to CAR-T, in part because of the immunosuppressive environment the tumours create. The good news is, scientists can now boost CAR-T’s cancer combat skills, at least in cultured tissue and mice. Studies showed that ramping up the activity of the intracellular metabolism factor PPARδ within CAR-T cells improved their fitness and sustained them in battle. Pictured are such cells (green) infiltrating a colorectal tumour (blue and red). In mouse models the enhanced cells could slow or stop tumour growth, providing hope that such a cell treatment could improve CAR-T performance in patients too.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image from work by Paul Bunk, Ilgin Ergin, Timothy Maher and Vyom Shah, and colleagues
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Nature Immunology, October 2026