Scientists at the Stanford School of Medicine discovered that when cancer cells turn into immune cells, they begin to teach other immune cells how to effectively fight cancer. The research was published in the journal Cancer Discovery.
Some of the most promising cancer treatments use the patient’s immune system to attack the cancer. However, there are many targets to attack, and each of these often needs to be dealt with separately. Doctors sometimes have to guess which will be the most promising.
A better approach would be to teach immune cells to recognize cancer naturally. In the learning process, special APC cells “show” to T cells what the pathogen looks like, which needs to be neutralized.
The scientists hypothesized that if they converted cancer cells into APCs, they could naturally train T cells to attack cancerous tumors.
Researchers have programmed mouse leukemia (blood cancer) cells so that some of them can develop into APCs. The scientists’ approach worked: immune cells recognized the cancer, and the mice were successfully treated.
When the scientists caused cancer again in mice 100 days later, there was a strong immune response that protected them from the tumor. The nature of blood cancers and hard-shell tumors are different. When the researchers tested their method on solid tumors, the effect was worse, but the animals’ survival rate increased significantly.
In the future, scientists’ discovery could be the basis for the creation of a therapeutic cancer vaccine.