A new type of immune cell which kills most cancers has been discovered by accident by British scientists, in a finding which could herald a major breakthrough in treatment.

Researchers at Cardiff University were analysing blood from a bank in Wales, looking for immune cells that could fight bacteria, when they found an entirely new type of T-cell.

That new immune cell carries a never-before-seen receptor which acts like a grappling hook, latching on to most human cancers, while ignoring healthy cells.

In laboratory studies, immune cells equipped with the new receptor were shown to kill lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer.

Professor Andrew Sewell, lead author on the study and an expert in T-cells from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, said it was “highly unusual” to find a cell that had broad cancer-fighting therapies, and raised the prospect of a universal therapy.

“This was a serendipitous finding, nobody knew this cell existed,” Prof Sewell told The Telegraph.

“Our finding raises the prospect of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ cancer treatment, a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population. Previously nobody believed this could be possible.”

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the new cell attaches to a molecule on cancer cells called MR1, which does not vary in humans.

It means that not only would the treatment work for most cancers, but it could be shared between people, raising the possibility that banks of the special immune cells could be created for instant ‘off-the-shelf’ treatment in future.

When researchers injected the new immune cells into mice bearing human cancer and with a human immune system, they found ‘encouraging’ cancer-clearing results.

And they showed that T-cells of skin cancer patients, which were modified to express the new receptor, could destroy not only the patient’s own cancer cells, but also other patients’ cancer cells in the laboratory.

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Professor Awen Gallimore, of the University’s division of infection and immunity and cancer immunology lead for the Wales Cancer Research Centre, added: “If this transformative new finding holds up, it will lay the foundation for a ‘universal’ T-cell medicine, mitigating against the tremendous costs associated with the identification, generation and manufacture of personalised T-cells.

“This is truly exciting and potentially a great step forward for the accessibility of cancer immunotherapy.”

Commenting on the study, Daniel Davis, Professor of Immunology at the University of Manchester, said it was an exciting discovery which opened the door to cellular therapies being used for more people.

“We are in the midst of a medical revolution harnessing the power of the immune system to tackle cancer.  But not everyone responds to the current therapies and there can be harmful side-effects.

“The team have convincingly shown that, in a lab dish, this type of immune cell reacts against a range of different cancer cells.

“We still need to understand exactly how it recognises and kills cancer cells, while not responding to normal healthy cells.”

The research was published in the journal Nature Immunology.

Source: Immune cell which kills most cancers discovered by accident by British scientists in major breakthrough 

River flow is reduced in areas where forests have been planted and does not recover over time, a new study has shown. Rivers in some regions can completely disappear within a decade. This highlights the need to consider the impact on regional water availability, as well as the wider climate benefit, of tree-planting plans.

“Reforestation is an important part of tackling climate change, but we need to carefully consider the best places for it. In some places, changes to water availability will completely change the local cost-benefits of tree-planting programmes,” said Laura Bentley, a plant scientist in the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, and first author of the report.

Planting large areas of trees has been suggested as one of the best ways of reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, since trees absorb and store this greenhouse gas as they grow. While it has long been known that planting trees reduces the amount of water flowing into nearby rivers, there has previously been no understanding of how this effect changes as forests age.

The study looked at 43 sites across the world where forests have been established, and used river flow as a measure of water availability in the region. It found that within five years of planting trees, river flow had reduced by an average of 25%. By 25 years, rivers had gone down by an average of 40% and in a few cases had dried up entirely. The biggest percentage reductions in water availability were in regions in Australia and South Africa.

“River flow does not recover after planting trees, even after many years, once disturbances in the catchment and the effects of climate are accounted for,” said Professor David Coomes, Director of the University of Cambridge Conservation Research Institute, who led the study.

Published in the journal Global Change Biology, the research showed that the type of land where trees are planted determines the degree of impact they have on local water availability. Trees planted on natural grassland where the soil is healthy decrease river flow significantly. On land previously degraded by agriculture, establishing forest helps to repair the soil so it can hold more water and decreases nearby river flow by a lesser amount.

Counterintuitively, the effect of trees on river flow is smaller in drier years than wetter ones. When trees are drought-stressed they close the pores on their leaves to conserve water, and as a result draw up less water from the soil. In wet weather the trees use more water from the soil, and also catch the rainwater in their leaves.

“Climate change will affect water availability around the world,” said Bentley. “By studying how forestation affects water availability, we can work to minimise any local consequences for people and the environment.”

Source: Local water availability is permanently reduced after planting forests

A little over a year ago, Caltech’s Lihong Wang developed the world’s fastest camera, a device capable of taking 10 trillion pictures per second. It is so fast that it can even capture light traveling in slow motion.

But sometimes just being quick is not enough. Indeed, not even the fastest camera can take pictures of things it cannot see. To that end, Wang, Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, has developed a new camera that can take up to 1 trillion pictures per second of transparent objects. A paper about the camera appears in the January 17 issue of the journal Science Advances.

The camera technology, which Wang calls phase-sensitive compressed ultrafast photography (pCUP), can take video not just of transparent objects but also of more ephemeral things like shockwaves and possibly even of the signals that travel through neurons.

Wang explains that his new imaging system combines the high-speed photography system he previously developed with an old technology, phase-contrast microscopy, that was designed to allow better imaging of objects that are mostly transparent such as cells, which are mostly water.

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Wang says the technology, though still early in its development, may ultimately have uses in many fields, including physics, biology, or chemistry.

“As signals travel through neurons, there is a minute dilation of nerve fibers that we hope to see. If we have a network of neurons, maybe we can see their communication in real time,” Wang says. In addition, he says, because temperature is known to change phase contrast, the system “may be able to image how a flame front spreads in a combustion chamber.”

The paper describing pCUP is titled “Picosecond-resolution phase-sensitive imaging of transparent objects in a single shot.”

Source: Ultrafast camera takes 1 trillion frames per second of transparent objects and phenomena