Jacob Kimmel

So example, T cells don't go into your brain.

They can, but it's generally a pathology when they get in there.

So it's not like literally every cell, but almost every cell in your body is surveilled by the immune system.

So there are very, very few what we call immune privilege compartments in your body.

It's things like the joints of your knees and your shoulders, your eyeball, and your brain, basically.

There might be a couple of these.

I think the ear probably falls into that category.

A funny way of thinking about this is all the gene therapy people using viruses, they want to deliver to the immune privilege compartments because their drugs are immunogenic and they're limited to a very, very small set of diseases.

So in a way, it's like the shadow of all the diseases you can't address with viruses is what you can address with cells.

And given the complementarity between them, it's like, okay, you can probably cover the entire body.

And so they can't literally go everywhere.

But I think your analogy to the CAR-T work is very apt as well, where you can think of that two-component system.

I've got some detection mechanism for the environment I want to sense to perform some function.

And then I have some sort of payload that I deliver.

CAR-T's engineer the first of those and leave the second exactly the same as the immune system does.

So

they engineer, go recognize this other antigen that you wouldn't usually target, some protein on the surface of a cell, for instance, and then deliver the payload you would usually deliver if it was infected by a virus or if you saw that it was foreign in some way, whereas cancer cells usually don't actually look that foreign.

Most of their genes are the same genes that

are in your normal genome, and that's why it's hard for the immune system.

Yeah, the Red Queen race is quite sophisticated.