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How a sugar coating could make these cancer killers even more powerful
CAR-T cell therapy uses your body's own blood cells, called T-cells, to seek out and destroy certain cancers. (AI generated image)
Science & Technology

How a sugar coating could make these cancer killers even more powerful

By Angela Nicoletti

June 8, 2026 at 1:45pm

Training the body’s immune system to fight cancer has revolutionized personalized medicine.

One such approach — CAR-T therapy— takes a patient’s own T-cells (a type of white blood cell) and genetically modifies them outside the body before they are returned to the patient. And it has been revolutionary for treating even the most aggressive types of lymphoma and leukemia. But some major challenges remain.

Before even reaching a tumor, CAR-T cells must survive the area that surrounds the tumor — packed with different molecules that can weaken or shutdown any sort of immune attacks.

Sometimes CAR-T cells simply cannot hold on long enough to completely eradicate cancer.

Now, researchers have found a way to help CAR-T cells circumvent these defenses.

“With our approach, we were able to roughly double the number of CAR-T cells that were still thriving and continued attacking the cancer in our lab experiments,” said Charles Dimitroff, study author and professor in FIU’s Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine.

Using an innovative technique known as glycoengineering, the team designed a surface ‘shield’ for the CAR-T cells, making them more resilient to the hostile tumor environment.

According to a preclinical study published in Frontiers in Immunology, these next-generation CAR-T cells outperformed standard CAR-T therapy — a promising pathway to more effective immunotherapies.

 

What you'll learn in this story

  • CAR-T cell therapy takes a patient's own immune cells and turns them into cancer-killing machines.
  • The problem: Long-term success of CAR-T cell therapy has been limited by the tumor microenvironment, which can suppress immune responses and reduce the therapy’s effectiveness. 
  • FIU researchers have developed new, next generation CAR-T cells that last longer in this harsh environment — and fight cancer for a longer time, compared to standard CAR-T cells. 
Charles Dimitroff and his research group scientists created a protective “sugar-coated” shield for CAR-T cells that helps them survive longer, fight tumors better and resist cancer’s defenses.

Before engineering better, more resilient CAR-T cells, Dimitroff and the team uncovered what precisely in the tumor microenvironment was weakening them. They analyzed blood samples from 62 people — 31 patients with a common form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma (diffuse large B-cell lymphoma) and 31 healthy participants. High levels of an immune-suppressing protein (galectin-3) were detected in people with cancer.

“This protein is a problem because it gums up the ability of immune cells, like T-cells, to do their anti-tumor function activities,” Dimitroff explains. “We knew we needed to engineer a cell that could be inconspicuous in the tumor microenvironment.”

All cells are coated with ‘sugars’ known as glycans. These molecules play roles in many processes, including serving as binding sites for proteins.

A leader in the field of glycobiology, Dimitroff and his lab spent over five years analyzing the sugar patterns on CAR-T cells to find out what makes them so vulnerable. Then, with glycoengineering, they rearranged the sugar structures to create a hardier, more resistant cell surface to prevent the protein from being able to latch on.

To test the viability of this approach, the team used bioluminescent imaging to track tumor growth and immune cell activity in mouse models of B-cell lymphoma.

Tumors shrunk significantly in the mice treated with the team’s special glycoengineered CAR-T cells. These enhanced cells also persisted longer and exhibited stronger anti-tumor activity than mice that received standard CAR-T cells.

“What makes this especially meaningful is we’re not fundamentally changing CAR-T cell therapy itself, but rather upgrading each cell’s own resilience by modifying its sugar surface, which reveals brand-new ways to enhance treatments,” said Lee Seng Lau, an FIU postdoctoral scientist in Dimitroff’s lab who helped lead the study.

Lee Seng Lau, FIU postdoctoral scientist in Dimitroff’s lab who helped lead the study.

Because many cancers produce similar immune-suppressing molecules, the study’s findings could have far-reaching implications. Particularly for solid tumors, which account for around 90% of adult cancer cases, but have historically been much harder to treat with current CAR-T cell therapies.

“CAR-T therapy has done a great job in blood cancers, but these cells have a limited survival and thus limited function over long periods of time in the body,” said Dr. Guenther Koehne, deputy director and chief of blood and marrow transplant and hematologic oncology at Baptist Health Herbert Wertheim Cancer Institute. “This groundbreaking work demonstrates that CAR-T cells live longer and are more effective by reversing the immunosuppressive effect on the tumor cells.”

Dimitroff’s lab continues to study the upgraded CAR-T cells to see whether they could help fight other hard-to-treat cancers in the future.