It's Friday, July 13th, 2018, and you're listening to Up to Date. I'm Andre Viscontas.

I'm Kishore Hari. It's Friday the 13th. That means it's just a normal day of the year, right?

Yeah, well, maybe a little bit spooky. It's movie night at my son's preschool. That's spooky to me.

30 toddlers all watching Pixar. That's probably loud. Yeah, my goodness. That's spooky to me. 30 toddlers all watching Pixar.

That's probably loud.

Yeah, try like 600 because I think it's like the entire summer camp roster.

Whoa.

Well, I have a not scary story for once.

I have an uplifting story.

And that's a potential breakthrough in how we fight cancer.

A study that came out this week, it actually came out July 11th in nature from the Alex

Marsen Lab at UCSF.

He actually looked at how can we use CRISPR to change the genomic structure of T cells so that those T cells

themselves, which would normally fight off any sort of infection, can be used to target

cancerous growth within your own body. That way you get over all of the issues with

immunorespons. You have a group of cells that's already

well spread out throughout your body that's already situated for destroying cells.

This idea of using your own T cells to fight against cancer has been a big area of research

for a long period of time. Well, Alex's lab took a slightly different approach. They're

going to use CRISPR and use that by delivering it through a virus into the T-cell itself,

altering the genomic structure, and have that alter in the genomic structure, basically input

the target of the cancer cell itself. And the way they did this is they

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