It has been just revealed the fact that there has been an enormous medical success – it’s been found a kill switch that activates cancer cell death in the lab! Check out more reports about this below.
Cancer success
Researchers have discovered a new way to treat cancerous tumors. They have found a method to open up the ‘doors’ that lead to the core of a tumor, making it more accessible for drug treatment. This technique involves activating a ‘timer bomb’ on the cells that line the blood vessels associated with the tumor.
These blood vessels are responsible for regulating access to the tumor tissue.
Until they are opened, immune cells cannot easily penetrate the tumor to fight it off. The timer bomb on these cells is called Fas (or CD95), which is a ‘death’ receptor. When activated by the right antibody, it triggers the programmed death of that cell.
Scientists at the University of California, Davis (UCD) and Indiana University believe that Fas has been undervalued in cancer immunotherapy and to date, not one Fas antibody has made it to clinical trials. Recent experiments on mice and human cell lines have led to the discovery of specific antibodies that, when attached to Fas receptors, effectively trigger self-implosion.
“Previous efforts to target this receptor have been unsuccessful. But now that we’ve identified this epitope, there could be a therapeutic path forward to target Fas in tumors,” explains immunologist and senior author of the study Jogender Tushir-Singh.
An antibody that binds to a specific part of the death receptor is known to be the kill switch for a cell.
This immune checkpoint helps cancer therapies like CAR-T therapy to gain access to more of their targets, which are usually clustered together and hidden within a tumor. CAR-T therapy is a treatment that involves programming a person’s white blood cells, known as T-cells, to attack certain types of cancerous cells.
However, these engineered immune cells often cannot get past bystander cells that lack the recognizable antigens typically used to target tumor cells. Due to this limitation, CAR-T therapy has only been approved to treat blood cancers or leukemia and has not provided consistent success against solid tumors.
“These are often called cold tumors because immune cells simply cannot penetrate the microenvironments to provide a therapeutic effect,” explains Tushir-Singh.
Check out more details about this interesting and amazing subject in the original notes.
