Florida International University scientists created a protective "sugar-coated" shield for CAR-T cells that helps them survive longer, fight tumors better and resist cancer's defenses.

MIAMI, June 8, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Scientists at Florida International University may have found a way to make a powerful cancer treatment work even better.

The treatment, called CAR-T therapy, uses a patient's own immune cells to fight cancer. Doctors remove special immune cells called T-cells from the body, genetically change them in a lab so they can recognize cancer, and then put them back into the patient to attack tumors. The therapy has already helped many people with serious blood cancers like lymphoma and leukemia.

But there is still a problem: cancer fights back.

Tumors create a protective environment around themselves that can weaken or shut down immune cells before they finish destroying the cancer. In many cases, CAR-T cells do not survive long enough to completely wipe out the disease.

Now, FIU researchers say they may have found a way to help.

"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.

In a study published in Frontiers in Immunology, researchers used a method called glycoengineering to change the sugary coating on the outside of CAR-T cells. The new coating acted like a shield, helping protect the cells from the tumor's defenses.

The team first studied blood samples from 62 people, including patients with lymphoma and healthy volunteers. They found high levels of a protein called galectin-3 in people with cancer. This protein weakens immune cells and makes it harder for them to fight tumors.

"This protein is a problem because it gums up the ability of immune cells, like CAR-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."

Dimitroff's lab spent more than five years studying the sugar patterns on CAR-T cells to understand why they were so vulnerable. Then researchers redesigned those sugars so the harmful protein could not easily attach to the cells.

The scientists tested the upgraded CAR-T cells in mice with lymphoma. The results were promising: tumors became much smaller, and the engineered CAR-T cells survived longer and fought cancer better than regular 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.

Researchers say this discovery could someday help improve treatments for many different cancers, especially solid tumors, which are much harder to treat with current CAR-T 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."

Researchers are continuing to study the upgraded CAR-T cells to see whether they could help fight other hard-to-treat cancers in the future.

An interview with Dimitroff, along with pictures and videos related to the research are available for use by media via this Dropbox folder.

Media Contact:
Madeline Baró
305-310-9665
mbaro@fiu.edu
news.fiu.edu
@FIU

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SOURCE Florida International University