Implant Raises Cellular Army to Attack Cancer
Source: New Scientist
New Scientist is running a story on an investigational cancer treatment that cured 90% of the mice who received the therapy. The treatment involved “reprogramming” the mice’s immune system to identify the cancer as an antigen and then attack it as such. The study’s authors claim that variations on the therapy could also be used for other serious disorders, such as type 1 diabetes.
Therapies based on augmenting a patient’s immune system response to disease or other disorders are part of the branch of medicine known as immunotherapy. They are already used to treat a number of conditions and innovative researchers continue to expand their domain of application. One of the great hopes for immunotherapy is the development of vaccines or other treatments in the fight against cancer. Because cancer grows from within a person, the immune system rarely identifies the malignancy as an antigen and generally leaves the tumor alone, allowing it to grow and spread relatively untouched. Therapies that train the immune system to recognize the cancer have been studied and some have shown an ability to fight the cancer, but their efficacy has been limited by the manner in which the treatment is given: the patient’s immune cells are removed from the body and trained to attack the cancer and are then injected back into the person to treat the malignancy. The problem with this method is that most of the re-injected cells—some estimates are as many as 90%—die before they have an effect.
Researchers from Harvard University have developed a new system that accomplishes the same “training” of cells, but does it through an implant. The treatment involves implanting a biodegradable polymer that is encoded with the chemical signature of the cancer and a “danger signal” to tell the body to attack agents with this same signature. When the polymer begins to breakdown, it releases a signaling molecule that starts the “training” process which eventually leads to the immune system organizing T-cells to attack the underlying malignancy.
To test their treatment, the researchers studied two sets of mice infected with an aggressive form of melanoma that usually kills within 25 days. The group that did not receive treatment all developed large tumors and had to be killed, but 90% of the group that received the implant were totally cured.
As is the case with all research, more studies are needed to validate the safety and efficacy of this treatment. However, the success demonstrated by this particular study is certainly a cause for hope that better treatments for diseases such as pleural mesothelioma and peritoneal mesothelioma may be found in the future.
