“What was especially remarkable was that the cells we’re generating in vivo actually look better than what we make in the lab,” says Justin Eyquem , associate professor of medicine at UCSF who led the research. “We think that when cells are taken out of the body and grown in the lab, they lose some of their ‘stemness’ and proliferative capacity and that doesn’t happen here.”
The study is a collaboration between researchers at UCSF, Karolinska Institutet, the Gladstone Institutes, Duke University and the Innovative Genomics Institute. The work was funded by, among others, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, the Swedish Research Council, the European Research Council and the Swedish Society for Medical Research. Several of the authors have reported conflicts of interest linked to patents and biotechnology companies. Justin Eyquem and his collaborators founded Azalea Therapeutics, a company based on the technology described in the study, with the aim of progressing the research to the clinical stage.
This news article is based on a press release from UCSF.
Publication
“In vivo site-specific engineering to reprogram T cells” , William A. Nyberg, Pierre-Louis Bernard, Wayne Ngo, Charlotte H. Wang, Jon Ark, Allison Rothrock, Gina M. Borgo, Gabriella Kimmerly, Jae Hyung Jung, Vincent Allain, Jennifer R. Hamilton, Alisha Baldwin, Robert Stickels, Sarah Wyman, Safwaan H. Khan, Shanshan Lang, Donna Marsh, Niran Almudhfar, Catherine Novick, Yasaman Mortazavi, Shimin Zhang, Mahmoud Abd Elwakil, Sidney Hwang, Simon N. Chu, Hyuncheol Jung, Chang Liu, Devesh Sharma, Travis McCreary, Zhongmei Li, Ansuman Satpathy, Julia Carnevale, Rachel L. Rutishauser, M. Kyle Cromer, Kole Roybal, Stacie E. Dodgson, Jennifer A. Doudna, Aravind Asokan, Justin Eyquem, Nature, online 18 March 2026, doi: 10.1038/s41586-026-10235-x.
