Significance?
This will surely go down as a seminal advance in cancer therapy. It reads like magic:
So this new approach looks for the specific proteins that are associated with a given tumors resistance to attack by the body's T cells, it then adjusts those T cells to be hyper sensitive to the specific oncogenic proteins targeted. These cells become essentially The Terminator T cells in the specific tumor AND have the multiplied effect of traveling along the immune pathway of spreading that the cancer many have metastasized. This is huge squared because it means you can essentially use targeting one tumor to identify and eliminate distal tumors that you many not even realize exist.
This allows the therapy for treating cancer to, for the first time; end the "wack a mole" problem that has frustrated traditional shot gun methods of treatment involving radiation and chemotherapy ...which by their nature unfortunately damage parts of the body that are not cancer laden but also don't always get all the cancer...leading to high rates of remission in particularly aggressive cancers.
This new method can also be applied as needed multiple times to target different tumor populations with in situ mutated protein signatures...so that after several treatments simultaneously administered, a much higher certainly of *complete curing* can be emerged. It appears recurrent populations in at least this study were due to not quite getting all the cells the first time of a given protein signature as subsequent hits of the same protein signature were still effective against the regressed cell population.
Another advantage of this method is that once a tumor of a given protein signature is injected the immune system does the process of eating away at the tumor and all distal metastasize which means naturally undoing any damage due to tumors disturbing organs , skin , bone ...in other words there is no need to do any hacking and cutting out of masses...the energized immune system takes care of that.
Another huge advantage is that for cancers that emerge from highly genetic causation factors (like some breast cancers as they studied in this paper) ...the method is still effective in dramatically reducing metastasized populations and preventing emergence of new populations. This is huge as it means this method can be used to extend the life span and health span of people with genetic propensity for deadly cancers until some form of gene therapy can be applied to remove that genetic susceptibility entirely.
Finally, the icing on the cake is that this method is highly targeted and works on a range of very different cancers (from lymphoma to colon to melanoma)...so much so that even after two types of cancers were introduced into a model organism ...engineering activation for one of the cancers only allowed curing of that cancer...this is a good thing because it means this approach reduces as much as possible the triggered immune load on the patient.
There have been advances in other methods that were to aggressive in the immune activity they emerged and the resultant inflammation actually killed the patients with this ...method this is less likely to happen ...particularly if a guided method for staging the activation of T cells is does so as to control the resulting immune response while killing all populations of metastasized tumor cells of a given protein targeting.
At the same time they discovered that if they injected a tumor with mixed proteins that this injected tumor created activated cells that could kill cancers with unmixed members of the same proteins so there was a multiplication effect in this direction! This is huge huge huge.
Wow. Just Wow.
The paper,
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kp6Nm16qNs8YHiH43gRNBt0LvoXlq-3U/view?usp=sharing
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