Question: Is it possible to “teach” a cell to target cancer?

Natasha Myhill answered on 15 Nov 2017:

With genetic engineering, this is definitely possible! The difficult bit is working out what to target, which has been a big struggle in cancer research so far. Cancer arises from our own cells, so even when they are mutated, there is not one defined marker (that we know of) that the cells expresses to say ‘look at me, i’m cancerous!’. A big complication is that a lot of markers that a cancer cell expresses are also expressed on healthy cells – so the killing cells would target both healthy and cancer cells. Some scientists are trying to work out if there is a marker that is specific only for cancer cells and how we could use this to ‘teach’ the cells to target it.