CRISPR Turns Invisible Prostate Tumors Into Targets…

CRISPR Turns Invisible Prostate Tumors Into Targets Immunotherapy Can Finally See Immunotherapy has transformed cancer treatment for many patients, but prostate cancer has largely resisted it. A new study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering describes a genuinely creative CRISPR based approach that may change that, by making prostate tumors visible to the immune system in the first place. Most prostate tumors are considered immune cold, meaning very few immune cells called T cells actually infiltrate the tumor. Without T cells present, immunotherapy has essentially nothing to work with, there's no immune response for it to boost. This research builds on a finding Wagner's team first made over a decade ago while studying brain cancer, that many messenger RNAs inside tumor cells are unusually shortened compared to normal cells. Shortened mRNAs tend to be more stable and harder for the cell to regulate, allowing them to keep producing protein for longer, essentially escaping the body's normal quality control systems. This shortening pattern has since been found across many cancer types. Researchers t