Cell-based therapies can enhance the specificity of anti-cancer therapeutic agents. In this context, human mesenchymal stromal cells (MSC) hold a promising future as cell delivery systems for anti-cancer proteins due to their innate tropism for tumors. iBB researchers Marília Silva, Gabriel Monteiro, Arsénio Fialho, Nuno Bernardes and Cláudia Lobato da Silva, engineered human MSC through non-viral methods to secrete a human codon-optimized version of azurin (hazu), a bacterial protein with demonstrated anti-cancer activity towards different cancer models in vitro and in vivo. Upon treatment with conditioned media (CM) from these engineered cells, a decrease in cancer cell proliferation, migration and invasion was seen, and an increase in cell death was observed for breast and lung cancer cell models. The results achieved by SCERG- and BSRG-iBB researchers were published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, Stem Cell Research section.
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