Roj Bash Kurdistan

Telegraph

Cancer 'vaccine' that remembers disease and fights it years later is developed by scientists

A revolutionary new cancer treatment that remembers the disease and acts like a watchman to prevent it ever returning is being developed by scientists.

Researchers are engineering immune cells so that they not only boost the body’s own natural defences to fight tumours, but stand guard for a lifetime - acting effectively like a vaccine.

Scientists say it is like having a "living drug", which is constantly vigilant to the return of cancer and quickly removes it from the body.

A new study, presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Washington, has proven for the first time that engineered "memory T-cells" can persist in the body for at least 14 years.

Professor Chiara Bonini, a haematologist at San Raffaele Scientific Institute and Vita e Salute San Raffaele University in Milan, said: “T-cells are a living drug, and in particular they have the potential to persist in our body for our whole lives.

“Imagine when you are given a vaccine as a kid and you are protected against flu or whatever for all of your life. Why is that? It’s because when a T-cell encounters the antigen and gets activated, it kills the pathogen but also persists as a memory cell.

“Imagine translating this to cancer immunotherapy, to have memory T-cells that remember the cancer and are ready for when it comes back.”

In a trial at a Milan hospital, ten patients who had bone marrow transplants were also given immune-boosting therapy which included the memory T-cells. They were found to be there 14 years later.

Immunotherapies, which harness the body’s own immune system, look set to replace cell-damaging chemotherapies. But one of the biggest challenges is to make these changes last long enough that the cancer cannot come back.

The Milan study proved for the first time scientists have shown that these cells can survive in the body well beyond the original cancer treatment.

Prof Bonini and colleagues are now working on a new wave of immune cells that can use sensor molecules known as antigen receptors to track down and wipe out a wide variety of types of cancer. When the cells are combined with the memory cells it should produce a treatment which effectively vaccinates the body against cancer.

“When a T-cell encounters the antigen and gets activated, it kills the pathogen but also persists as a memory cell,” she said. “Some of these memory T-cells will persist through the entire life of the organism, and so if you encounter the same pathogen – say if the same strain of flu comes back ten years later – then you have memory T cells that remember it from ten years earlier and kill it quickly so you don’t even know you’re infected.”

Daniel Davis, professor of immunology at the University of Manchester, said it was an "important advance" in cancer treatment.

“The implication is that infusing genetically modified versions of these particular T-cells, the stem memory T-cells, could provide a long-lasting immune response against a person’s cancer,” he said.

“Immunotherapy has great potential to revolutionise cancer treatments and this study shows which type of T-cells might be especially useful to manipulate for long-lasting protection.

"This research area is hot – no question about that. Our detailed knowledge of T-cells is paying off here with important new ideas for tackling cancer.”

In a separate presentation at the AAAS, a team of US scientists showed that their T-cell immunotherapy treatment for leaukaemia had an “unprecedented” success rate of 94 per cent in patients who had been given only months to live.

US scientists said they had achieved “extraordinary” results in early clinical trials.

Stanley Riddell, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, said balancing the different types of immune cells and then equipping them with cancer-sensing molecules had saved the lives of leukaemia patients for whom all other treatments had failed.

His team treated 26 patients whose acute lymphoblastic leukaemia was so advanced they had only two to five months to live. After 18 months, 24 of the patients were in complete remission.

“These are in patients that have failed everything,” Professor Riddell said. “This is extraordinary. This is unprecedented in medicine to be honest, to get response rates in this range from very advanced patients.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science ... tists.html

Physicists Have a New Way of Precision Targeting Cancer Cells

The perils of cancer treatment are well known: To target the bad cells, it's usually necessary to hit some of the good ones in the process. Friendly fire.

Cancer cells are just so often deeply integrated within healthy tissues, sharing not just space with normal cells, but characteristics, too. Conventional chemotherapeutic agents are cytotoxic to cells that are fast-reproducing, which includes cancer cells by definition, but also lots of healthy cells as well. Radiation therapy, meanwhile, involves firing intersecting beams of destructive radiation at tumors—hitting some neighboring healthy cells in the process, to varying degrees, is part of the bargain.

Researchers are aggressively hunting for alternatives capable of targeting cancer cells at the highest possible resolutions. A therapeutic agent capable of softly knocking on the door of a cancer cell in the middle of the night and hustling it away in an unmarked van is a long-sought capability. To that end, physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen have accomplished something very close: a molecular "vehicle" with the ability to deliver a cytotoxic agent directly to a cancer cell, and then prompt that cancer cell—and only the cancer cell—to accept the destructive payload. The Copenhagen group's research is described this week in the journal Scientific Reports.

The idea is pretty clever. Again: Chemotherapy involves dumping a bunch of cytotoxic chemicals into the body more or less as-is, which then go on to kill fast-reproducing cells, healthy or no. What the physicists imagined is a cytotoxin that would only be accepted into a cell under certain conditions. What if it was, say, bundled in with something that cancer cells really want?

The question was then of what that thing could be. Noting that cancer often spreads to the bones, the physicists decided to try pairing the cytotoxic Paclitaxel (PTX), a popular and effective drug used to treat lung, breast, and ovarian cancers, with a variety of calcium phosphate called hydroxyapatite (HAP), a mineral required for bone growth and health.

"The use of [HAP], the main inorganic constituent of human bones and teeth, is an excellent candidate," the physicists note. "At the nano-scale, HAP presents special biocompatibility as well as non-immunogenicity, non-inflammatory behaviour, high osteoconductivity, and good adhesion to different types of cancer cells. Of even more interest, HAP nanoparticles (nHAP) show inhibitory effect on cancer cells proliferation with lower effects on the healthy ones."

Tiny, cell-scale units of cytotoxins were first doped with even tinier magnetic beads, a common technique in medical research useful for driving substances around the body or around tissues using magnets. These units were then coated with a protective layer of a biological polymer material, leaving capsules of encapsulated poison protected from their surroundings (and vise versa). These capsules were then doped with HAP particles.

In experiments with breast cancer, lung cancer, and colon cancer cells, the group found that their cytotoxic payloads were being ignored by healthy cells and accepted into cancer cells. The cancer cells showed evidence of metabolic changes and the early stages of cell death. It was working.

"The next steps in this work will focus on further understanding the encapsulation effects on the dynamics of the released PTX and its correlation with its biological activity as well as in the optimization of the drug release mechanism," the researchers conclude.

Using calcium phosphate as a cancer-targeting agent isn't an entirely new idea. It's been suggested a few times in recent years, albeit with different mechanisms. For one thing, the mineral is known to break down in the acidic microenvironment of tumors, leaving open the possibility of delivering cytotoxins within calcium phosphate containers that open up on the doorstep of cancer cells, but not healthy cells. In the currently proposed scheme, the mineral acts more as a happy wrapping paper around the toxin with some other biologically useful polymer forming the box (a ring-shaped sac, really), while the earlier alternative would use the mineral as the box itself.

The trick with encapsulating cytotoxins is that they don't always properly couple to their container, leaving the possibility of still introducing a bunch of unprotected, dangerous cytotoxins into the patient. Part of the Copenhagen group's advance was in developing a screening system to separate out the uncoupled cytotoxins from the properly sealed cytotoxins.

This isn't a cure for cancer, but it does at least promise a new way around the toxic effects of chemotherapy treatments. That's good for general patient well-being, but we can also imagine it opening up new and possibly more effective chemotherapy dosage ranges, or perhaps opening up the possibility of treatment at all for patients otherwise too weak or sick to withstand it.

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The Telegraph

Scientists find 'Achilles' heel' of cancer offering hope for most deadly cases

The ‘Achilles’ heel’ of cancer has been discovered by scientists which could lead to treatments for hopeless cases where disease has spread throughout the body.

In a finding hailed as ‘groundbreaking,’ researchers found that all cancer cells carry a ‘flag’, which can be spotted by the immune system, no matter how much they mutate.

Current treatments are often unsuccessful because cancer evolves rapidly, cunningly changing its make-up so it can evade drugs.

But scientists at University College London and Cancer Research UK have found that even when it has mutated cancer still carries signature molecules which never change.

Crucially, these molecules are antigens – toxins which can be spotted by the immune system. Immune cells which battle those antigens already exist in the body, but in too small numbers to be effective.

However by ‘fishing out’ those immune cells and multiplying them in the lab, it should be possible to wipe out cancer, even when it has spread throughout the body.

“The body’s immune system acts as the police trying to tackle cancer, the criminals,” said Dr Sergio Quezada, Cancer Research UK scientist and head of the Immune Regulation and Cancer Immunotherapy lab at UCL Cancer Institute.

“Genetically diverse tumours are like a gang of hoodlums involved in different crimes - from robbery to smuggling. And the immune system struggles to keep on top of the cancer – just as it’s difficult for police when there’s so much going on.

“Our research shows that instead of aimlessly chasing crimes in different neighbourhoods, we can give the police the information they need to get to the kingpin at the root of all organised crime – or the weak spot in a patient’s tumour – to wipe out the problem for good.”

It means that, in future, doctors could look at the genetic profile of a tumour to locate the ‘flags’ then engineer billions of special immune cells which could be transferred back into the body in large numbers to kill tumours.

The genetic profile could also be used to create a vaccine to ramp up the body’s own defences against the cancer.

Importantly, it would work on cancer that had spread throughout the body, because the underlying tumours would all have the same genetic ‘flag.’

Around 320,000 people are diagnosed with cancer in Britain every year, and while survival rates are steadily increasing, there is little that can be done for patients whose disease is spotted after it has spread throughout the body.

Like a snowflake, or fingerprint, no two tumours are the same, so scientists would need to take a biopsy of a tumour before they could engineer bespoke immune cells to target the cancer. However once the treatment had been administered the cancer would be unlikely to come back, because the ramped-up immune system would not know what to fight.

Researchers are hoping that the first trials will be carried out on patients within two years.

Professor Charles Swanton, co-author from the UCL Cancer Institute said the new approach ‘could improve survival significantly.’

“This is exciting,” he told a briefing in London. “Now we can prioritise and target tumour antigens that are present in every cell. It gives us as an Achilles’ heel to go for.

“This opens up a way to look at individual patients’ tumours and profile all the antigen variations to figure out the best ways for treatments to work.

“This takes personalised medicine to its absolute limit where each patient would have a unique, bespoke treatment.”

Professor Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said the research ‘filled in the gaps’ about why some treatments had failed to work in the past.

“This fascinating research gives us vital clues about how to specifically tailor treatment for a patient using their immune system,” he said.

“This gives us hope of developing better treatments for some of the cancers we have previously found hardest to treat.

“I think we will look back at this in five-years’ time and think this was the moment of understanding cancer better.”

The research is published in the journal Science.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/ ... cases.html

Mail Online

A cancer cure in just one jab? British scientists say they have found the disease's 'Achilles heel' paving the way for 'revolutionary' new treatments

British scientists today claimed to have found cancer's Achilles' heel

In future, patients could be given bespoke therapies that hunt out and destroy every single cancer cell, wherever it is in their body

The first people could be treated in as little as two years, scientists say

Charity: 'It could prove a revolutionary way to treat or even cure disease'

Cancer’s Achilles’ heel has been pinpointed by British scientists, raising hopes of a revolution in treatment – and even a cure.

In future, patients could be given bespoke therapies that hunt out and destroy every single cancer cell, wherever it is in their body.

The first people could be treated in as little as two years and, eventually, everyone from those in the early stages of cancer, to those who are riddled with the disease could benefit.

A spokesman for Cancer Research UK, which funded the landmark study, said that if it lives up to its promise, ‘it could prove a revolutionary way to treat or even cure cancer’.

Despite advances in medicine, cancer claims more than millions of lives worldwide each year - and even so-called ‘wonder drugs’ only give patients an extra few weeks of life, on average.

The study, led by experts from University College London, gets to the heart of why existing treatments are often of limited benefit.

Although we think of a tumour as being a lump of identical cells, it grows and mutates over time.

Existing drugs typically zero in on one type of cell and, if the cancer changes too much, a medicine that seemed to help will stop working.

And even if the drug seems to wipe out the cancer, some highly-mutated cells may still be lurking and the disease returns.

However, some hardy mutations are found on every single cancer cell in a tumour and the UCL researchers have found a way of identifying them.

Link to Full Easy to Understand Explication - Photos - Video:

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