As tumor cells rapidly grow, they take away surrounding oxygen and nutrition to utilize them on their own growth and proliferation.
Thus, T cells, NK cells, and other immune cells around cancer tissues are suppressed and cannot function well. MJCellBio plans to utilize activated immune cells which function well even in the tumor microenvironment. Especially, MJCellBio is exploring basic researches to develop NK cells which shows full cytotoxicity even in tumor microenvironment such as hypoxia while T cells cannot destroy tumor cells with loss or lower level of expression of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) to avoid the immune surveillance of T cells.

There are small amount T cells specifically fighting against cancer cells in our body, the adoptive cell therapy with simple amplification of those cells cannot provide significant anti-cancer effect. Thus, MJCellBio is conducting basic researches for artificial amplification of antigen-specific T cells for cancer treatment. To strengthen tumor antigen specific responses, MJCellBio plans to use the cancer vaccine technology called recombinant overlapping peptide (ROP) of Oxford VacMedix (OVM) where CancerROP is the primary stockholder. Also, MJCellBio plans to utilize neo-antigens identified by molecular diagnosis to enhance T cell immune response.