Researchers in
immunotherapy trials engineer cells so they boost body’s natural defences and
stand guard for lifetime - acting effectively like vaccine
Researchers are engineering immune cells so that
they not only boost the body’s own natural defences to fight tumours, but stand
guard for a lifetime - acting effectively like a vaccine.
Scientists say it is like having a "living
drug", which is constantly vigilant to the return of cancer and quickly
removes it from the body.
A new study, presented at the American Association
for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, has proven for the
first time that engineered "memory T-cells" can persist in the body
for at least 14 years.
Professor Chiara Bonini, a haematologist at San Raffaele
Scientific Institute and Vita e Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, said:
“T-cells are a living drug, and in particular they have the potential to
persist in our body for our whole lives.
“Imagine when you are given a vaccine as a kid and
you are protected against flu or whatever for all of your life. Why is that?
It’s because when a T-cell encounters the antigen and gets activated, it kills
the pathogen but also persists as a memory cell.
“Imagine translating this to cancer immunotherapy,
to have memory T-cells that remember the cancer and are ready for when it comes
back.”
In a trial at a Milan hospital, ten patients who had
bone marrow transplants were also given immune-boosting therapy which included
the memory T-cells. They were found to be there 14 years later.
Immunotherapies, which harness the body’s own immune
system, look set to replace cell-damaging chemotherapies. But one of the
biggest challenges is to make these changes last long enough that the cancer
cannot come back.
The Milan study proved for the first time scientists
have shown that these cells can survive in the body well beyond the original
cancer treatment.
Prof Bonini and colleagues are now working on a new
wave of immune cells that can use sensor molecules known as antigen receptors
to track down and wipe out a wide variety of types of cancer. When the cells
are combined with the memory cells it should produce a treatment which
effectively vaccinates the body against cancer.
“When a T-cell encounters the antigen and gets
activated, it kills the pathogen but also persists as a memory cell,” she said.
“Some of these memory T-cells will persist through the entire life of the
organism, and so if you encounter the same pathogen – say if the same strain of
flu comes back ten years later – then you have memory T cells that remember it
from ten years earlier and kill it quickly so you don’t even know you’re
infected.”
Daniel Davis, professor of immunology at the
University of Manchester, said it was an "important advance" in
cancer treatment.
“The implication is that infusing genetically
modified versions of these particular T-cells, the stem memory T-cells, could
provide a long-lasting immune response against a person’s cancer,” he said.
“Immunotherapy
has great potential to revolutionise cancer treatments and this study shows
which type of T-cells might be especially useful to manipulate for long-lasting
protection.
"This research area is hot – no question about
that. Our detailed knowledge of T-cells is paying off here with important new
ideas for tackling cancer.”
In a separate presentation at the AAAS, a team of US
scientists showed that their T-cell immunotherapy treatment for leaukaemia had
an “unprecedented” success rate of 94 per cent in patients who had been given
only months to live.
US scientists said they had achieved “extraordinary”
results in early clinical trials.
Stanley Riddell, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Centre in Seattle, said balancing the different types of immune cells
and then equipping them with cancer-sensing molecules had saved the lives of
leukaemia patients for whom all other treatments had failed.
His team treated 26 patients whose acute
lymphoblastic leukaemia was so advanced they had only two to five months to
live. After 18 months, 24 of the patients were in complete remission.
“These are in patients that have failed everything,”
Professor Riddell said. “This is extraordinary. This is unprecedented in
medicine to be honest, to get response rates in this range from very advanced
patients.”
What with the sewer plant that allows Industrial chemicals, the mess left from AO, the new school unbelievably located next to an old burn dump, a landfill that oooozes out poisons eating up the real estate value of another pair of homes every 2-4 months, and neighborbood factories, IS there a better place to test this than Southbridge?
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