Nanomedicine for Cancer Immunotherapy: Tracking Cancer - Specific T-Cells In Vivo

Application of immune cell-based therapy in routine clinical practice is challenging, due to the poorly-understood mechanisms underlying success or failure of treatment. Development of accurate and quantitative imaging techniques for non-invasive cell tracking can provide essential knowledge for elucidating these mechanisms. We designed a novel method for longitudinal and quantitative in vivo cell tracking, based on the superior visualization abilities of classical X-ray computed tomography (CT), combined with state-of-the-art nanotechnology. Herein, T-cells were transduced to express a melanoma-specific T-cell receptor and then labeled with gold nanoparticles (GNPs) as a CT contrast agent. Using CT, we found that transduced T-cells accumulated at the tumor site, as opposed to non-transduced cells. This new method for cell tracking with CT offers a valuable tool for research, and more importantly for clinical applications, to study the fate of immune cells in cancer immunotherapy.