This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Findings demonstrate new ways to exploit immune system to treat cancer
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
The American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting focused on a lot of new discoveries and novel approaches about how to use the body’s immune system to treat patients with cancer.
We have understood for a very long time that there are certain proteins that are expressed on cancer cells but not on normal cells. These are the proteins we target for immunotherapy.
In the last couple of years, because of advances in technology, we have more powerful strategies to discover these altered proteins, called neoantigens, that can be recognized by the immune system and can mediate tumor regression.
The ability to use neoantigens for cancer therapy is a very exciting area, because it opens up a lot of possibilities about how to manipulate the immune system.
At Roswell Park Cancer Institute, we have focused on an approach called adoptive cellular therapies.
In this approach, we harvest lymphocytes and re-engineer them to basically turn them into serial killers. When we put them back into the patient — in an approach that is similar to a blood transfusion — these killer cells can recognize, attack and destroy cancer cells. This is a major development, as it has demonstrated efficacy in several tumor types.
One major question is, when we put these re-engineered cells back into patients, how do we make them persist for a long time? How do we make them persist potentially for the lifetime of the patient, whereby they continually replenish and provide a source of anticancer killer cells?
We have taken hematopoietic stem cells — precursor cells that give rise to immune cells — and re-engineered them so they turn into cancer-fighting cells when they mature in the body. We believe this approach is likely to provide long-lasting, durable control of cancers, and we will be launching a clinical trial to test this.
Overall, we have seen tremendous progress in immunotherapy over the last few years. There are now new avenues for exploiting the immune system to help patients with cancer, and we expect that — in a matter of time — almost every patient will have some form of immunotherapy incorporated into their treatment plan.
For more information:
Kunle Odunsi, MD, PhD, FRCOG, FACOG, is deputy director of Roswell Park Cancer Institute, M. Steven Piver professor and chair of the department of gynecologic oncology, and executive director of the institute’s Center for Immunotherapy. He can be reached at Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Elm and Carlton streets, Buffalo, NY 14263; email: kunle.odunsi@roswellpark.org.
Disclosure: Odunsi reports no relevant financial disclosures.