Hard-to-treat cancers often suppress antitumor immune responses and cell death mechanisms to evade demise. To overcome these obstacles, the Langer Lab has developed an mRNA nanotherapy that forces tumor cells to self-destruct, and to do so in a “fiery” fashion that leads to the recruitment and reprogramming of immune cells to kill the cancer.

Here, a human glioblastoma cell undergoes immunogenic death after this treatment. Pictured are the cell death proteins (red), cytoskeleton (yellow), and DNA (blue).