A discovery in how stem cells become immune cells could give the broader research and biotech community a powerful new tool — and bring cell therapies within reach of more patients
For patients facing certain cancers, cell therapy has offered hope where few options remained. But producing these treatments has long been slow, expensive, and dependent on each patient having enough healthy immune cells to work with. A new discovery from researchers at the University of British Columbia and B.C. Children's Hospital Research Institute could change that by unlocking a method that researchers and manufacturers across the field can use to build better therapies faster.
When the treatment itself is the breakthrough
Cell therapies work by enlisting the immune system as a direct participant in treatment. Rather than targeting tumours with chemical compounds, therapies like CAR-T reprogram a patient's own immune cells to recognize and destroy cancer — turning those cells into what researchers describe as "living drugs." For patients with otherwise untreatable blood cancers, the results have been transformative.
Yet these therapies remain out of reach for many. Most are custom-built for individual patients: immune cells are extracted, modified in a laboratory, and reinfused. This process takes roughly two weeks and depends on the patient having sufficient high-quality cells to begin with. For someone already weakened by disease or prior treatment, that is not always possible. And the cost is formidable.
The more scalable alternative, such as manufacturing immune cell therapies ahead of time from stem cells, much like conventional drugs, has long been recognized as the path to broader access. Dr. Megan Levings, co-senior author of the study and a professor at the Department of Surgery, School of Biomedical Engineering at UBC shares:
"The long-term goal is to have off-the-shelf cell therapies that are manufactured ahead of time and on a larger scale from a renewable source like stem cells. This would make treatments much more cost-effective and ready when patients need them."
The challenge has been doing it reliably — particularly for one of the most important immune cell types in the cancer-fighting toolkit.
A key piece of the puzzle
Effective cell therapies for cancer depend on two types of immune cells working in concert. Killer T cells attack cancer directly. But helper T cells play a less visible and equally essential role: they detect threats, activate other immune cells, and sustain the immune response over time — acting, as researchers describe it, as the immune system's conductors.
"Helper T cells are essential for a strong and lasting immune response," said Dr. Levings. "It's critical that we have both to maximize the efficacy and flexibility of off-the-shelf therapies."
While researchers had made progress generating killer T cells from stem cells in laboratory settings, helper T cells had remained stubbornly difficult to produce. That is the problem the UBC-led team set out to solve.
Tuning the signal at the right moment
Working across UBC's School of Biomedical Engineering and B.C. Children's Hospital Research Institute, the team identified the mechanism responsible. A developmental signal called Notch plays a critical, time-sensitive role in how stem cells mature. While Notch activity is necessary early in immune cell development, if it remains active too long, it prevents helper T cells from forming at all.
"By precisely tuning when and how much this signal is reduced, we were able to direct stem cells to become either helper or killer T cells,"
- Dr. Ross Jones, Co-first Author & Research Associate, Zandstra Lab at UBC
Crucially, the process was demonstrated under controlled laboratory conditions directly applicable to real-world biomanufacturing — an essential step toward making this discovery viable at scale.
The resulting helper T cells were not simply similar to their naturally occurring counterparts — they behaved like them. They showed markers of healthy mature cells, carried a diverse range of immune receptors, and could specialize into subtypes that play distinct roles in immunity. "These cells look and act like genuine human helper T cells," said Kevin Salim, a UBC PhD student in the Levings Lab and co-first author. "That's critical for future therapeutic potential."
A discovery designed to be shared
What sets this work apart is the scope of what it makes possible. The finding, Tunable differentiation of human CD4+ and CD8+ T cells from pluripotent stem cells, opens the door to manufacturing therapeutic treatments not only for cancer, but for autoimmunity, chronic inflammation, and transplant medicine. UBC has filed a patent on the technology and is developing a dedicated manufacturing facility to support the production of helper T cells at the volumes required for clinical research.
The goal is to establish a method that researchers and bioengineers across institutions and industry can adopt, refine, and apply — expanding the entire field's capacity to develop better, faster, and more accessible therapies.
"This technology now forms the foundation for testing the role of helper T cells in supporting the elimination of cancer cells and generating new types of helper T cell-derived cells for clinical applications. This is a major step forward in our ability to develop scalable and affordable immune cell therapies."
- Dr. Peter Zandstra, Co-senior Author, Professor & Director, UBC School of Biomedical Engineering
While stem cell-derived immune therapy trials are already underway in the United States, Canadian patients have not yet had access to this generation of treatments domestically. Jones and Salim's team hopes to initiate Canadian clinical trials using helper T cells produced through their method. "We're hoping that with our discovery, more people in the field can reliably make more helper T cells for therapy and research," said Salim.
