Scientists hope to develop a new cancer immunotherapy for multiple solid tumors!

20, 2020 /PRY/ -- Scientists from Purdue University and others have developed a new type of cancer immunotherapy that could help treat multiple solid tumors, according to a recent study published in the international journal Lancer Research entitled "Folate Receptor Beta Designates Immunosuppressive Tumor-Associated Myeloid Cells Can Be Reprogrammed with Folate-Targeted Drugs."
researchers say the new treatment may not work by attacking cancer cells, but by focusing on immune cells, which ironically nourish tumors and block other immune cells from destroying them.
this new treatment is unique and has been shown to work in six different types of tumors, and so far it has been tested in human tumor cells and human tumors in animal model bodies in the laboratory.
photo source: Purdue University Therapy targets special immune cells that act on the body to brake the immune response.
other cases, when an individual becomes sick or injured, the body uses these immunosuppressive cells to block the normal healing response, preventing the reaction from getting out of control, as if we were using brakes in a car.
but in cancerous tumors, these cells have an unwelcomely catastrophic effect, slamging the brakes at the wrong time, blocking the body's own defenses against tumors. 'We can reprogram the immune cells in the tumor to help kill the tumor, rather than allowing them to help the tumor grow,' said low,
researcher Low. 'It wasn't until recently that we realized that as a universal way to eradicate solid tumors, we also needed to treat healthy non-malignant cells in tumors.'
, depending on the type of cancer, about 30%-80% of cells in solid tumors are not cancer cells and are used as normal functions in other tissues.
The difference is that these cells penetrate into solid tumors and are trained by cancer cells to promote tumor growth, but although cancer cells are highly specific to the type of cancer, the treatment of breast cancer is different from the treatment of brain cancer, but also different from the treatment of lung cancer;
In this technique, anticancer drugs that are usually too toxic to humans are associated with folic acid, a vitamin B that has few normal cells that have folic acid, so it passes through the body, but cancer-related immune cells may have folic acid.
'We use vitamin folic acid to target drugs specific to these non-malignant cells in the tumor, but unfortunately it promotes tumor growth, and these tumor-related macrophages are very "like" folic acid, which has a very large appetite for folic acid and can be ingested immediately, and if not ingested, these folic acid molecules are excreted through urine within half an hour,' said low, a researcher.
the researchers used folic acid as a class of Trojan horses to trick tumor-promoting immune cells into ingesting drugs, reprogramming them as tumor-resistant immune cells.
part of drug development is to ensure that drug loads, which are inherently fatal to patients, are released only in tumor-promoting macrophages.
Now researchers have designed a variety of molecules and chemicals to optimize this combination, and they have designed these molecules so that if they cannot be ingested immediately by cancer-promoting cells, they will be excluded from the body, and if the drug is not used immediately, the researchers hope it will disappear immediately.
has been shown to be universally effective compared to current cancer immunotherapy.
Ratliff points out that there are many therapeutic antibodies that can be used in certain types of cancer, and many people have heard of checkpoint immunotherapy, which blocks specific parts of the immune response;
this paper, they were thrilled by the folic acid-targeted therapy, which was the first study the researchers had found to target cells that act to promote tumor growth.
these cells are important for tumors, but they are not tumor cells themselves, and by targeting bone marrow cells in tumors, researchers may be able to articulate a common process because they are present in all solid tumors.
later this year, researchers will continue to study further to confirm the effectiveness of the new immunotherapy in more experiments.
() References: (1) Gregory M. Cresswell, Bingbing Wang, Erin M. Kischuk, et al. Folate Receptor Beta Designates Immunosuppressive Tumor-Associated Myeloid Cells that Can Be Reprogrammed with Folate-Targeted Drugs, Cancer Research (2020). DOI: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-20-1414【2】New cancer immunotherapy shows great promise in early researchby Purdue University。