Escape tag

In the unlikely case that our therapeutic cells escape from the capsules and to prevent their dissemination through the body we designed a safety mechanism that would enhance the recognition and destruction of the escaped therapeutic cells by the innate immune system.

We introduced an escape tag that labels the cells with a surface protein that alerts natural killer cells of the host organism to recognize and destroy cells.

HEK293 cells expressing MICA protein were efficiently killed by human NK cells.

We considered several variants to ensure destruction of escaped cells such as: