Combining Forces

Like Batman and Robin or Holmes and Watson, combining complementary skills can make the ultimate team. A new approach to treating leukaemia puts this principle into action by harnessing the powers of two different types of cell. Leukaemia, cancer of white blood cells, is hard to treat. It often returns in people even after treatment, because rogue cells can hide in the bone marrow, evading detection. Researchers might have found a way to clear out even these crafty cancer cells, by joining blood platelets (green) onto stem cells (purple). The platelets can carry the cancer-fighting drugs, and the stem cells are expert navigators, able to home into the bone marrow and hunt out cancer cells. In experiments in mice, this combination treatment halted disease progression, and reduced disease recurrence, raising hope that it may one day help improve treatments for cancer patients.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Quanyin Hu and colleagues
• Department of Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, October 2018