ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) — For certain cancer patients, a treatment called t-cell therapy can be life-saving. But a big downside to this method is that the patient’s entire immune system must first be destroyed with chemo or radiation. Now, a new discovery in mice could change that for people in the future.
For people with cancer, chemo and radiation can be life-saving, but they can also cause serious side effects.
Jenifer Briley, Breast Cancer Patient says, “I lost all of my hair. I lost my eyelashes. I lost my eyebrows. I didn’t tolerate food for a while. I ran fevers. I had bone pain.”
Now, researchers are studying a new method that could eliminate the need for chemo and radiation before having a treatment called t-cell therapy. With this approach, doctors collect a patient’s own immune cells, grow and enhance them in a lab, and then inject them back. Normally, patients need to receive chemo and radiation to wipe out their immune system before t-cell therapy, but that could change down the road.
Andre Goy, MD at Hackensack University Medical Center, explains “Immunotherapy has been the holy grail really of cancer therapy because we know the immune system is able to kill cancer cells. You reset the immune system and it continues to work.”
Now, a research team led by UCLA in collaboration with scientists from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania discovered engineering t-cells with a lab-made receptor called i-l-9 allows the cancer-fighting cells to do their work without the need for chemo or radiation. In one model involving mice, the researchers cured more than half of the animals that were treated with the synthetic i-l-9 receptor t-cells. This breakthrough could one day allow doctors to treat more cancer patients with t-cell therapy and fewer side effects.
T-cell therapy may be an option for different types of cancer, but it’s more commonly used in people with blood cancers. It’s also being looked at for melanoma, cervical squamous cell carcinoma, bile duct cancer, and other types.
Contributors to this news report include: Julie Marks, Producer; Roque Correa, Editor
Sources:
SKIP THE CHEMO: CANCER BREATHROUGH?
REPORT #2995
BACKGROUND: Chemotherapy and radiation are both treatments for cancer. Chemotherapy, or chemo, uses special drugs to shrink or kill cancer cells, where radiation kills these cells with high-energy beams such as x-rays or protons. Even though chemo and radiation both attack cancer cells, they work differently. Chemo drugs circulate in the bloodstream and kill or shrink cancer cells anywhere in the body, not just at the site where the primary tumor started. They are called systemic drugs because they pass through the entire body’s system. Radiation uses invisible bursts of energy instead of drugs and is usually a local treatment that aims energy beams just at the area where cancer cells grow. Both treatments share the same goals such as getting rid of all cancer cells and stopping the cancer from coming back; shrinking or slowing cancer tumors or stopping the spread of cancer cells to other parts of the body; and shrinking tumors to lessen pain and other difficult symptoms of cancer.
CURRENT CANCER TREAMENTS: There are currently several options to choose for cancer treatments. Surgery is used for many types of cancer where the surgeon takes out the mass of cancerous cells and some of the nearby tissue in hopes to relieve side effects caused by the tumor. Chemotherapy are drugs used to kill cancer cells that can be given by mouth or through an IV into a blood vessel. Radiation therapy uses x-rays, particles, or radioactive seeds to kill cancer cells and prevent them from growing and dividing, leading to cell death. Immunotherapy relies on the body’s ability to fight infection. It uses substances made by the body or in a lab to help the immune system work harder to fight cancer. Hormone therapy is used to treat cancers such as breast, prostate, and ovarian. It uses surgery, or drugs, to block the body’s natural hormones resulting in slowing the growth of cancer cells. Hyperthermia uses heat to damage and kill cancer cells without harming normal cells. In photodynamic therapy, a person gets a shot of a drug that stays in the cancer cells longer than healthy cells. The drug is sensitive to a special type of light in which the doctor directs from a laser at the cancer cells to destroy them. And cryotherapy uses very cold gas to freeze and kill cancer cells. It is sometimes used to treat pre-cancerous cells on the skin or cervix.
NEW STUDY LESSENS NEED FOR CHEMO: Researchers led by UCLA’s Anusha Kalbasi, MD, along with scientists from Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, have discovered a synthetic IL-9 receptor that allows cancer-fighting T cells to do their work without the need for chemo or radiation. A study showed the engineered T cells were potent against tumors in mice. “When T cells are signaling through the synthetic IL-9 receptor, they gain new functions that help them not only outcompete the existing immune system but also kill cancer cells more efficiently,” Kalbasi said. The therapy proved to be effective in multiple systems. They targeted pancreatic cancer and melanoma, two types of hard-to-treat cancer, models in mice and used T cells targeted to cancer cells through the natural T cell receptor or a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR). “The therapy also worked whether we gave the cytokine to the whole mouse or directly to the tumor,” Kalbasi said.
(Source: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/ucla-study-identifies-receptor-could-alleviate-need-chemo)
* For More Information, Contact: Mary McGeever
Mary.mcgeever@hackensackmeridian.org
Free weekly e-mail on Medical Breakthroughs from Ivanhoe. To sign up: http://www.ivanhoe.com/ftk
