natural killer cell

But there are other ways to reprogram cells, either using Yamanaka factors or some other factors, biological and physical interventions.

So it's a huge universe, and there is separate universe of actually cell medicine for immune cells, uh, either reprogramming some cells into, uh, cells that, um, in deficiency, like specific NK cells for cancer treatment, even specific, uh, populations of them, or some other immune cells, or specifically reprogrammed, uh, immune cells, CAR T cells, CAR NK cells targeting specific cancers.

Uh, that's what actually cell medicine is working on current-currently.

Uh, and with CAR cells, there is a combination actually of, uh, gene therapy and cell medicine to specifically use, um, genetic manipulations to create, uh, immune cells with specific program targeting specific cancer cells.

Yeah, well, it's a fascinating question.

And in the area of cell therapy, you know, you have CAR T and you have CAR NK right now.

There are other cell types, macrophages and other things that people try to engineer.

We haven't seen a lot of those cell types out there, but in terms of cell therapy, there's CAR T and there's CAR NK.

You know, there's other gene therapies that are out there that have found their way through.

But in the field of cell therapy, What's fascinating to me about Kar and K is that these cells very well defined they act like drugs they go into the patient they have a short a relative residence time about the residence time that a drug has maybe longer and you can you can engineer them to be in the body longer before they get removed from the body but they go in they do their thing and they leave and since they're natural killer cells they tend to kill things and so what they're killing in the field of autoimmune disease are the bad b cells that are associated with autoantibodies and bad autoimmune effects like swollen joints, like skin rashes.

So we've been talking mostly today about autologous CD19 targeting CAR-T therapy, although we've heard that other B-cell targets are also in play, like BCMA.

There are other technologies now for achieving deep B-cell depletion, such as in vivo CAR-T, CAR-NK, allergenic off-the-shelf cell therapy.

Where do you think we're heading in this space? Dinesh, I'll ask you first.

Yeah, I think it's a really exciting time, and I think it provides a lot of available therapeutic opportunities for our patients.

they try to figure out what's the secret sauce? You know, what distinguishes them? Do they have like very good HDL cholesterol or, you know, what is it? And they said it's all over the map.

But the one thing they did find is that they had an unusually high number of natural killer cells.

So does that square with this theory about immune regulation?

Well, that could be part of it.

It's not just the number of natural killer cells.

It's their efficacy.

Yeah,

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

We force the endogenous system to help heal- By using, you know, stem cells, cell therapies, uh, you know, natural killer cells is something we talked about briefly too, that we do quite a bit of work on.

Uh, elimination of senescence, modulation, strengthening of the immune system, uh, to do so.

Yeah.

And, and crazily, for instance, in my, in, in my lab here, um, you know, here in California, we study...

And we've, we've gotten answers because of this.

We study natural killer cells a lot 'cause we do have an autologous platform, and we now have an allogeneic, from somebody else, platform too.

And the reason why we've gone allogeneic, meaning somebody else platform, is because it's...

Big eater.

Of all the grisly stuff that goes on in the never-ending street war that is your immune system, some of the most gruesome stuff is done by a kind of cell called natural killer cells.

Which reminds me, I think it's time for our very first open letter.

An open letter to 1973.

Maybe you would have screwed it up, but I don't think we could have done any worse than all this G.D. Greek we have to deal with all the time.

Thanks for the Endangered Species Act.

Okay, natural killer cells, more than just a great name, also the only phagocyte in the innate immune system that destroys other human cells.

When your cells are healthy, they have a special protein on their surface called MHC-1, MHC for Major Histocompatibility Complex.

That is a useful basic concept before we go into the details.

Okay, Philipp, can you explain the role of natural killer cells and regulatory T cells in simple terms? Sure, Nele.

Natural killer cells are an immune cell population that we have studied extensively.

They are particularly interesting because they are highly sensitive to exercise.

There are very few immune cell populations that respond as strongly to physical exertion.

Natural killer cells are mobilized and activated particularly strongly by acute exercise.

Their role is especially relevant in the context of cancer and viral infections.

In simplified terms, you could think of them as a kind of internal tumor police.