Brand new work in the fast-growing field of immunotherapy is being hailed by some
as a potential ‘universal’ cure for all cancers.
But how does that work? And is it close to actually happening?
So, there are a couple of different types of immunotherapy,
but this recent news relates to a very specific category called T-cell therapy.
The human body has a bunch of different kinds of immune cells,
but this therapy uses only one kind: your T-cells, which are a kind of white blood cell.
These cells have surface molecules all over them called receptors,
and they patrol your body looking for stuff that shouldn’t be there.
It’s basically a lock and key situation: if the lock is the receptor on the T-cell, the key is what’s called an antigen.
That’s a surface structure on whatever cell your body wants to get rid of,
like one that’s been infected by a virus.
Once the T-cell binds to the antigen, it activates different immune pathways to get rid of that unwanted intruder.
And immunotherapy leverages this natural process by basically hacking the system.
This is the idea behind existing T-cell therapies for cancer.
Scientists remove some of a patient’s own T-cells,
and they genetically engineer them to grow new receptors
that are specific to whatever your personal cancer is.
So your T-cells now have the right ‘lock’ that they need to be able to recognize the ‘key’ on your own cancer cells,
and then your body can attack and destroy them.
These therapies are really good tools to have in our arsenal of cancer solutions,
but they still can have negative side effects, they aren’t always successful, and they’re extremely expensive.
Plus—they’re highly personalized.
They’re not universal, they only work in your body and no one else’s.
So, we’re looking for something better and broader.
And a team out of Cardiff University may have just found a different lock.
They used CRISPR-Cas9 to create a library of modified cancer cells,
which helped them describe an entirely new T-cell that finds and binds to something called MR1.
This is a cell-surface molecule that basically marks cancer cells as problematic.
Small side note here: CRISPR technologies have become super useful in cancer research,
and if you want to know more about it, ‘cause it’s really cool, check out the sources in the description.
Anyway, it turns out, MR1 doesn’t vary from person to person or from cancer to cancer.
Like, my MR1 is the same as your MR1,
and it’s the same on the surface of lung, liver, pancreatic, breast, melanoma cancer cells...I could keep going.
And if MR1 is a ‘universal key’...then that means these T-cells could be a universal lock.
The Cardiff team has actually showed that these T-cells can kill lung, liver, breast, melanoma,
and other cancer cells—all while leaving healthy cells alone.
But that’s just in cell culture, like in a dish.
So the team went further and introduced the MR1-targeting T-cells to mice
with human immune systems and human cancer cells…
and the T-cells controlled the spread of that cancer.
The team even successfully genetically engineered other T-cells from the blood of cancer patients to target MR1.
These T-cells then proved successful in killing the patient’s own tumor cells in a dish.
If scientists can develop a widely-applicable therapy from these findings,
then our whole understanding of cancer—and the way we treat it—could fundamentally change.
These early results are certainly very promising and very exciting,
and the research team has already entered into a partnership with a biotech company
to hopefully develop a treatment they can actually bring to patients.
But this news should also be treated with caution.
There are many more steps left between that vision...and where we are now.
So while it could be a huge step, we still don’t know for sure if it could work for all cancers in all people,
like some news headlines are suggesting.
And the team has to make sure that these T-cells really only attack cancer cells
and are actually safe for use in human patients, which could take a while.
This work is a very fundamental demonstration of something that could change
the way we treat cancer forever—but we’ve still got a lot of exploring to do first.
If you want even more on groundbreaking medical discoveries,
then check out this video on heart patches over here, and subscribe to Seeker for all of your biomedical news.
If you have something else cancer-related that you want to see us cover,
leave it for us in the comments below, and thanks so much for watching. I’ll see you next time.