New mechanism of activation of the immune system to combat cancer will allow immune cells to detect and destroy cancer cells much more effectively than was done previously.
An international team of researchers was headed by Professor Harvard medical school Nick Haining (Nick Haining) co-authored with Professor Levanon Erez, a (Erez Levanon) and doctoral student Lanou Buchanans (Nolan Buchumansky) from the faculty of natural Sciences of Bar-Ilan University (Israel), informs Rus.Media.
The focus of the work of scientists is paid to the mechanism which normally maintains the cell, marking genes, similar to human viruses, not to identify them as viruses. In their study, Professor Levanon, along with a team from Harvard found that by inhibiting this mechanism, the immune system can be used to fight cancer cells more effectively, proving most useful in lung cancer and melanoma.
“We found that, if the mechanism is blocked, the immune system becomes much more sensitive. When the mechanism is deactivated, the immune system becomes more aggressive relative to tumors,” emphasizes Levanon.
Most patients who have cancer or do not respond to the blockade of immune checkpoints, or develop resistance to it, often due to acquired mutations, which impair antigen presentation. In their study, the researchers first showed that the loss of function of RNA-redaktoro enzyme ADAR1 in cancer cells allows to prepare a tumor to immunotherapy and overcome the resistance to the blockade checkpoints.
In recent years, we developed a new generation of anticancer drugs that block proteins that suppress immune activity against malignant tumors. These drugs demonstrated significant results in the fight against several types of tumors. In 2018, the Nobel prize in medicine was awarded to James Allison (James Allison) and Tasuku, Honcho (Tasuku Honjo), which discovered key genes of this mechanism. Despite this achievement, the current generation of drugs helps only a small number of patients, while most of the drugs are not able to force the immune system to attack the tumor. Among scientists it is hoped that this discovery will make a step forward in this issue, but some companies have already started the research on search