This god assists and helps checkpoint inhibitors to awaken the immune system of cancer

Immunotherapy is a promising cancer treatment strategy that destroys tumor cells by stimulating the body's own immune system, but it is only effective for a small number of cancers

Their new method is to get some tumor cells from the body, treat them with chemotherapy drugs, and then put them back into the tumor

Michael Yaffe, director of the MIT Cancer Precision Medicine Center, said: "When you make cells with DNA damage but not killed, under certain conditions, these surviving and damaged cells will send a signal to Wake up the immune system

In mouse studies, the researchers found that this treatment can completely eliminate tumors in nearly half of the mice

Activate T cells

One class of drugs currently used for cancer immunotherapy is checkpoint blocking inhibitors, which can stop T cells that cannot attack tumors

The MIT research team began to try to combine these drugs with chemotherapy drugs to improve their performance, hoping that chemotherapy can help stimulate the immune system to kill tumor cells

Yaffe and colleagues first treated cancer cells with several different chemotherapy drugs

Surprisingly, they found that most chemotherapy drugs did not help much

Yaffe said: “This describes a new concept of immunogenic cell damage in cancer treatment, rather than immunogenic cell death

The drugs most suitable for this method are those that cause DNA damage

"Our findings are fully in line with the concept that'danger signals' in cells can talk to the immune system.

Eliminate tumors

The researchers then conducted studies on mice with melanoma and breast tumors

Researchers have also tried to inject DNA-damaging drugs directly into the tumor instead of treating the cells in vitro, but they found that this has no effect, because chemotherapy drugs can also damage T cells and other immune cells near the tumor

Yaffe hopes to test this method on patients who do not respond to cancer immunotherapy

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Ganapathy Sriram, Lauren E.