An international team of researchers believes it has made an important discovery about the genetics of cancer tumours that they say could offer a new way to deliver customized cancer-killing therapies.
The team said their research, published in the would help to fine-tune the way existing immunotherapy drugs are used on the most complex cancers, such as melanoma and lung cancer.
Immunotherapy -- currently one of the most promising areas of cancer research -- uses specific proteins to try to stimulate the bodyâs immune system to recognize tumours as âforeign agents.â The immune system then goes after these tumours, destroying them while leaving healthy cells alone.
Such treatments help get around one of the key problems that can make cancer so difficult to treat. Many tumours are able to deactivate the bodyâs T-cells, which are the soldiers of the immune system, detecting bad cells and destroying them.
As well, cancer tumours mutate as they grow so that they are never made up of one kind of cell. Instead, they are a mixture of many kinds of rogue cells that can behave very differently from one another, evading the treatments used to target them.
But now researchers from Harvard, MIT and University College London, have found that even as tumours mutate, they still produce distinct âflags,â or antigens, which appear on the surface of all the tumourâs cells.
Finding these unique flags within a tumour is the equivalent of finding the cancerâs "Achilles heel,â the team says.
The finding is important, they add, because it is not enough to simply alert the immune system to a particular antigen in a tumour. The antigen has to be present on all the tumour cells; otherwise, treatment might leave some cells unharmed, allowing the tumour to begin growing again.
Study co-author Prof. Charles Swanton, from the University College Londonâs Cancer Institute, says the findings pave the way for treatments that would activate T-cells to target and attack all tumour cells at once.
âThis opens up a way to look at individual patientsâ tumours and profile all the antigen variations to figure out the best ways for immunotherapy treatments to work, prioritizing antigens present in every tumour cell and identifying the bodyâs immune T-cells that recognize them,â he said in a statement.
So far, the team has not yet tried using their findings to treat live patients, but they say their findings could lead to more precise, personalized treatments. Swanton told The Guardian his team hopes to launch a study in lung cancer patients in the next two to three years.
âItâs incredibly exciting,â Swanton said in a statement, âand although itâs early days, it offers hope that we might just be able to turn the tide against advanced cancer â something we desperately want for our patients.â
Sian Bevan Canadian Cancer Societyâs Research Institute find this latest research âinteresting,â saying the whole field of immunotherapy is exciting and provides lots of new opportunities for new treatments.
âThe whole idea behind this work is to personalize the treatment depending on the different mutations in the tumours,â she told ŰÎŰ´ŤĂ˝ Channel from Toronto.
Cancer Research UK has produced an explanatory video,