The glycocalyx is developed with high levels of cell-surface mucins, which are thought to help protect the cancer cell from immune cell attack. However, up to now, there has been limited understanding of this barrier particularly as it relates to cell-based cancer immunotherapies.

These types of treatments involve removing immune cells from a patient, modifying them to seek and destroy cancer, and then putting them back into the patient’s body.

“We found that changes in the thickness of the barrier that were as small as 10 nanometers could affect the antitumor activity of our immune cells or the engineered cells used for immunotherapy,” said Sangwoo Park, a graduate student in Matthew Paszek’s Lab at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

How are you doing now?

The visualization is incredible, I had no idea how much went into treating breast cancer. I always thought it was a mastectomy and a round of chemo.