One injection put three of five melanomas into remission

MIT researchers have found a way to turn immune cells into cancer killers without ever taking them out of the body, a shift that could strip the cost and complexity out of a treatment that now requires shipping a patient's blood to a lab and back. The work, published in Nature Biotechnology, uses tiny fatty particles to deliver mRNA instructions straight to natural killer cells, reprogramming them to hunt diseased cells. In mice with aggressive melanoma, three of five treated animals went into complete remission. In a model of autoimmune liver disease, a single injection cleared the harmful cells, and the damaged tissue healed on its own. "If a patient can just get an infusion of nanoparticles, it would dramatically simplify the process and reduce costs," said Daniel Anderson, the senior author. The experiments were in mice, so human trials are a long way off. Roughly 80 percent of the targeted cells did what they were told.