Home » Health » ‘Supersoldiers’ against cancer | Burgos Daily News

‘Supersoldiers’ against cancer | Burgos Daily News

The creation of specific white blood cell supersoldiers to drive an antitumor response has been demonstrated in a series of experiments conducted by researchers from the Princess Margaret Foundation of Canada, as published in the journal Molecular Cell. The research, led by doctoral candidate Helen Loo Yau, postdoctoral fellow Dr. Emma Bell, and senior scientist Dr. Daniel D. De Carvalho, describes a DNA-modifying epigenetic therapy that can transform immune killer T cells into “supersoldiers” by increase its ability to kill cancer cells.

Their findings could potentially improve immunotherapy, a new paradigm in cancer treatment that is currently effective for a minority of patients. Some patients respond well to immunotherapy, and their tumors shrink dramatically, but others respond only partially or not at all. Doctors and scientists around the world are working to understand why immunotherapy only helps some patients.

“Our goal for the future is to use this strategy in combination with other immunotherapies to improve antitumor immunity,” advances Dr. De Carvalho, associate professor in the Department of Medical Biophysics at the University of Toronto.

“We envision a future clinical trial in which we collect T cells from the patient for treatment with epigenetic therapy in the laboratory. This could expand the army of cancer-killing cells effectively creating an army of super soldiers infused into the patient, potentially enhancing their immune response built into the tumor, he explains. The laboratory this specialist observed for the first time an increase in the infiltration of T cells in mouse tumors treated with epigenetic therapy. When they killed the T cells, the therapy stopped working, suggesting that the T cells contributed to the success of the treatment.

Intrigued by this finding, the researchers set out to apply this epigenetic DNA modification therapy directly to T cells in the laboratory. They isolated T cells from healthy human donors, as well as from patients with melanoma, breast, ovarian and colorectal cancer. Their results showed that epigenetic therapy enhanced the cancer-killing ability of T cells.

Epigenetics works by adding or removing chemical “tags” to DNA. Like removable sticky notes, these labels help specify which genes can be turned on or off. You can simply change the function of a cell using the relevant drugs that change these epigenetic tags.

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