Human Immune System Also Destroys Brain Cancer Cells

• comments
• 
• 

A new way to combat cancer is not by chemical but by immune system that is all along present in human body since conception. Immunotherapy has yet to prove itself with solid tumors like breast, prostate, lung, colon and brain cancers.

In the news and publication of the Cancer Research Institute, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and the Cancer Research Institute announced a major collaboration focusing on neoantigens. Scientists believes that the search for neoantigens may hold the key to developing a new generation of personalized targeted cancer immunotherapies.

Because neoantigens are both specific to each individual and unlikely to be present on normal healthy cells, immune system may consider it as an optimal target and thus, a possible new class of personalized vaccines with the potential for significant efficacy with reduced side effects can be made.

Neoantigens are markers present on the surface of the cancer cells and are absent on normal tissue. Usually, it arises from the mutations that occur as tumor cells rapidly divide. Since immune system recognize these markers as "foreign", cancer cells will be targeted by the immune system for destruction.

However, researchers must have to develop a software programs that will enable to analyze the tumor DNA and output the unique set of markers that the immune system most likely to recognize in order to predict which neoantigens will be present on a patient's tumor.

Likewise, according to Time, in a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Behnam Badie led the research from the City of Hope Beckman Research Institute and Medical Center saying that the same immune-based therapy that is successful against blood cancers also helped patient with advanced brain cancer.

Based on the research, a 50-year-old man having a glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain cancer, has already been treated with surgery, radiation and anti-tumor drug therapies but his cancer still returns and spreads even more from the brain to the spinal cord. Knowing this, Dr. Badie and his team extracted immune cells from the patient and engineered it to recognize and destroy the glioblastoma cells.

After the removal of the bulk of the brain tumor, Dr. Badie and colleagues directly injected the site with modifiied T-cells six times and the remaining part of the tumor stopped growing

Nevertheless, smaller growths in the brain continue to grow. So, another 10 more doses of T-Cells are given to the patient into the brain ventricles. Surprisingly, the man did not develop any signs of serious complications and after four months, tumors started to shrink. By six months, almost all disappeared.