Painting a Target on Cancer to Make Therapy More Effective

May 19, 2025

Biomedical engineers at Georgia Tech created a treatment that could one day unlock a universal strategy for treating some of the hardest-to-treat cancers — like those in the brain, breast, and colon — by teaching the immune system to see what it usually misses.

Their experimental approach worked against those kinds of cancers in lab tests and didn’t damage healthy tissues. Importantly, it also stopped cancer from returning.

While the therapy is still in early stages of development, it builds on well established, safe technologies, giving the treatment a clearer, quicker path to clinical trials and patient care.

Reported in May in the journal Nature Cancer, their technique is a one-two punch that flags tumor cells so they can be recognized and then eliminated by specially enhanced T cells from the patient’s own immune system.

Get all the details on the College of Engineering website.