Cell Death Discovery: Medication improves immunotherapy

, July 10, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- BioValley BIOON/--- immunotherapy is a treatment that uses the body's immune system to identify, attack and kill tumor cells, and while it is the most promising new treatment available, it has failed in many cancer patients, a new study published in the journal cell death discovery suggests that blocking the tumor-promoting protein MDM2 enhances the effectiveness of immunotherapy"Immune therapy is one of the biggest breakthroughs in biomedical and medical science over the past two decades, but it has limitations," said DrWafik El-Deiry, associate dean of oncology and laboratory medicine at Brown University in"El-Deiry hopes to block MDM2 by genetically silencing or suppressing MDM2's drug AMG-232(pictured)various studies have found that when the MDM2 gene is amplified (meaning cells contain too many copies of THE MDM2 gene), or when MDM2 proteins are overexpressed due to poor gene regulation, tumor cells tend to grow faster and become more resistantImmunotherapyResearchers are still investigating why this accelerated growth and resistance occurs, but studies show that MDM2 can help tumors grow and evade the immune system through a variety of mechanismsMDM2, for example, appears to inactivate the anti-cancer gene p53 and prevent immune cells from killing tumor cells, and is also associated with higher levels of IL-6in their study, El-Deiry and his colleagues treated the cell lines of MDM2-expressed ovarian cancer cells with therapeutic AMG-232The data showed that AMG-232 enabled immune cells to kill tumor cells more effectively and reduced IL-6 levelsThese results suggest that MDM2 inhibitors can be used in combination with immunotherapy to enhance their effectivenessfor this specific finding, El-Deiry hopes the study will lead to clinical trials so that the team can further assess the safety and efficacy of the new treatmentHe believes that because MDM2 amplification and overexpression are associated with a variety of cancers, he believes that AMG-232 (or similar drugs, including drugs that simultaneously block MDM2 and related protein MDMX) may be widely used and even benefit cancer patients with immunotherapy at normal MDM2 levels(Bio Valley Bioon.com)source:Drug treatment treatment improve ei effectiveness of thefor cancer patients
original source:Ilyas Sahin et al.
AMG-232 sensitizes high MDM2-expressing tumor-cells to T-cell-mediated killing,Cell Death Discovery(2020)DOI: 10.1038/s41420-020-0292-1