A Ludwig Cancer Research study shows that ovarian cancer, which has proved resistant to currently available immunotherapies, could be susceptible to personalized immunotherapy. Led by Ludwig Lausanne investigator Alexandre Harari and George Coukos, director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, Lausanne, the study shows that ovarian tumors harbor highly reactive killer T cells -- which kill infected and cancerous cells -- and demonstrates how they can be identified and selectively grown for use in personalized, cell-based immunotherapies.
"Tumors whose cells tend to be highly mutated, like those of melanoma and lung cancer, are the ones that respond best to immunotherapies," says Harari. "It has long been a question whether we'd even be able to detect sufficiently mutation-reactive T cells in patients with tumors that have low mutational loads."
[...] To get around this problem, researchers have been developing sophisticated methods to extract T cells from patients, select and expand those that best target a patient's cancer and reinfuse them into the patient. These approaches usually rely on T cells extracted from the bloodstream, not those already inside the tumor, which are referred to as TILs (for tumor infiltrating lymphocytes).
Journal Reference: Sara Bobisse, Raphael Genolet, et al. Sensitive and frequent identification of high avidity neo-epitope specific CD8 T cells in immunotherapy-naive ovarian cancer. Nature Communications, 2018; 9 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03301-0
(Score: 1) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday March 21 2018, @03:38AM (3 children)
Aren't most developing therapies too expensive and too slow?
How can such therapies get applied in the field earlier? To my untrained eye, the danger to a patient 'consuming' his own retrained T cells to target his own cancer should be much less than, say, consuming a dose of a pharmaceutical like thalidomide. Could biohackers speed up usage, especially if they are treating themselves?
Obtaining your own T-cells or infusing them is not difficult. The missing step is 'Training' them -- is this a viable option for a biohacker?
Say, using PD-L1 inhibitors [theconversation.com] on T-cells. Or simply centrifuging, or warming-and-cooling T-cells -- a process that seems to activate them [researchgate.net] )?
(Score: 1) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday March 21 2018, @03:54AM
As the paper makes clear, obtaining tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte T-Cells is a great advantage for immunotherapy. How would you obtain it? From a biopsy sample?
IL-2 seems to activate T-cells too, and is already in use for cancer treatment [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday March 21 2018, @04:06AM (1 child)
I'm getting around to the point of view that medical tasks need to be partially or wholly automated.
There's no way a small set of medical professionals can keep up with best practises and current research to take care of 7 billion people. The power to heal needs to be pushed to the 'edges'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 21 2018, @04:02PM
Forget having drug synthesis machines be commonly available, even if feasible, because of puritans who would rather people die than other's be happy in the wrong way.