Team:Fudan-CHINA
Cell therapy has shown great potential in cancer treatment these years, while the existing CAR-T cell therapy can only target on cell surface antigens.
However, there are also many tumour markers free in the blood, also being important targets marking the location of tumour. Here we manage to construct a brand new transducer system, named STEP, to recognise small, soluble tumour markers (e.g. VEGF, AFP, TSGF).
For that purpose, we adapt and optimise a newly developed system to transduce the input (free ligands) into release of a transcription factor and expression of desired drugs. To increase the recognition ability, we use Rosetta to redesign the interface between ligand and receptor in order to enhance the binding affinity.
Our STEP system can be applied for detecting tumour markers in blood and secrete drug in real time to appropriate tissues, providing a new yet practical approach for cell therapy and cancer treatment.