Immunology is a potential disease treatment that operates by boosting the body’s immunological systems to kill tumor cells. However, it only succeeds for a few tumors.
Scientists at MIT have identified a fresh technique to kick-start the immunity program’s assault on tumors that they think will enable therapy to be employed versus a wider range of cancers.
The Immune System May Be Reactivated By A New Cancer Treatment
The immune system of the body is its true shield that keeps the body safe against attacks of various bacteria and viruses. Over a period when this system weakens, it becomes easy for these microorganisms to attack the body and damage it.
In new research, it is found that this system can be activated again.
It can be used to counter the cancer cells in the body. This new technique is still under development, but clinical trials have offered promising results. Hence the experts believe it to be a good option for cancer patients.
Tumor tissues are removed from the system, treated with chemotherapeutic medications, and then returned to the tumor. Whenever combined with T-cell activating medications, the wounded tumor cells seem to serve as a distress call, prompting T cells to respond.
“When you create cells that have DNA damage but are not killed, under certain conditions those live, injured cells can send a signal that awakens the immune system,” says Michael Yaffe, a David H. Koch Professor of Science.
Terminal blockade inhibitors are a type of melanoma immunotherapy medicine that works by releasing the brakes on T cells that had grown “exhausted” and incapable of fighting tumors. Some medications have been demonstrated to be effective in the treatment of select kinds of cancers, but rarely in the treatment of numerous more. The scientists discovered that in mouse trials, this medication was able to fully remove tumors in almost 50% of the animals.
Yaffe& his colleagues went out to combine such medications with cytotoxic chemo drugs in the expectation that the treatment would assist activate the immunological systems to destroy tumor cells and therefore increase their effectiveness. This strategy is predicated on a phenomenon called immunostimulatory apoptosis, which occurs when deceased or decaying tumor cells give signals to the immune response.
The reason for this is later discovered: it wasn’t deceased tumor cells that are boosting the immune response; rather, it is cells that had been damaged by chemo but are still living. Many drug studies mixing chemo and immunology medications were now being conducted, but nothing is understood about the optimum strategy to mix those 2 kinds of treatments at this time.
“This describes a new concept of immunogenic cell injury rather than immunogenic cell death for cancer treatment,” Yaffe says. “We showed that if you treated tumor cells in a dish when you injected them back directly into the tumor and gave checkpoint blockade inhibitors, the live, injured cells were the ones that reawaken the immune system.”
“Our findings fit perfectly with the concept that ‘danger signals’ within cells can talk to the immune system, a theory pioneered by Polly Matzinger at NIH in the 1990s, though still not universally accepted,” Yaffe says.
Getting rid of tumors
“You have to present something that can act as an immunostimulant, but then you also have to release the preexisting block on the immune cells,” Yaffe says.
Yaffe plans to explore this strategy in individuals whose malignancies haven’t reacted to treatment, but additional research is required first to figure out which medications, and at what dosages, will be best effective for various tumor kinds. The scientists were also looking into the specifics of how the wounded tumor cells trigger such a powerful T cell reaction.
