'Backpacked drugs' can boost immunotherapy for solid tumors
Immunotherapy is gaining ground in cancer treatment, but there is still a long way to go until we can manage to improve immune system-boosting drugs to be effective against different types of tumors. Could newly designed, drug-carrying nanoparticles be the answer to better immunotherapy?
Immunotherapy enhances people's immune cells in order to boost the body's natural defenses against cancer.
Two prominent ways of doing this are:
- removing tumor-specific T cells — which are specialized immune cells — from a person's own tumor, and then growing them in the laboratory before re-administering them to the patient intravenously
- isolating already circulating T cells in a patient's blood and then "training" them to target tumor-specific proteins — either by genetically modifying them, or by exposing them to such proteins, so that they can adapt
But while these strategies have shown promise in the treatment of blood cancers, such as leukemia or lymphoma, they do not seem to be as effective in the treatment of solid tumors, such as those seen in breast cancer, for instance.
A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge is now developing a way to boost the effect of T cells against solid tumors while avoiding side effects.
The scientists are testing the use of specialized nanoparticles carrying immune-boosting drugs capable of attaching to T cells.
"We found you could greatly improve the efficacy of the T cell therapy with backpacked drugs that help the donor T cells survive and function more effectively. Even more importantly, we achieved that without any of the toxicity that you see with systemic injection of the drugs."
-Senior study author Prof. Darrell Irvine
The researchers' paper is now published in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
