New breakthrough could help the immune system fight cancer

An international team of researchers believe may have discovered a breakthrough in cancer treatment, as they believe they have found a way to direct a patient’s immune system to attack specific biological markers within a tumor cell in order to combat the disease.
The study, which was funded by Cancer Research UK and published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, follows research into the lung and skin cancer cells that found that tumor cells possess a set of genetic flags which could be targeted by the body’s built-in defense system.
According to BBC News, previous attempts to create vaccines that direct the immune system to target cancer cells have largely failed because those cells are not uniform in nature. Rather, they are heavily mutated, genetically varied, and behave drastically different from one another.
However, even as those cells grow and mutate, there are surface proteins, also known as antigens, that the authors of this new study believe could be potential targets for new therapies that harness the power of the immune system to fight the disease, The Guardian added.
While treatments that use the body’s own defenses have proven effective in some cancers, such as melanoma, other forms of the disease are able to avoid being labeled as potentially harmful to the body. However, lead researcher Charles Swanton from the Francis Crick Institute in London is convinced that antigens could be the “Achilles’ heel” of tumor cells.
Researchers hope to begin human trials by 2018 or 2019
As Swanton explained to The Guardian, he and a team of colleagues from Harvard University, University College London and elsewhere “found for the first time… that tumors essentially sow the seeds of their own destruction, and that within tumors, there are immune cells that recognize those flags which are present in every tumor cell.”
By analyzing cancer patients as part of their study, the researchers found that those immune cells did attack the cancer cells, but that they weren’t strong enough to destroy the tumors. They found that some of the immune cells did recognize these genetic flags in the cancer cells, but wound up being outnumbered by the malignant cells or wiped out by the tumor’s defenses.
Armed with this knowledge, Swanton’s team sees two possible methods that could be used to treat cancer patients. In one case, doctors could take and analyze a biopsy to find the flags that are present on each of the malignant cells, then multiply the immune cells that recognize those flags and infuse them into the patient. In the other, the actual flags themselves could be used to develop a new vaccine to treat that specific form of cancer.
As BBC News pointed out, the treatment method would likely be very expensive and has yet to be tested – although Swanton said that he hopes to conduct the first human trials in lung cancer patients within the next two to three years. Other experts caution that while the treatment sounds simple enough, it will likely be more complicated than first impressions would suggest.
“Targeting trunk mutations makes sense from many points of view, but it is early… and whether it’s that simple, I’m not entirely sure,” Dr. Marco Gerlinger from the Institute of Cancer Research told the British media outlet. Many cancers evolve constantly, he added, and could “change and evolve” to “lose the initial antigen” or develop new ones to confound the immune system.
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Image credit: Cancer Research UK