Immunotherapy: Unlocking New Ways to Fight Cancer
Learning of a cancer diagnosis has commonly brought with it not only fears for one’s health and one’s life, but the knowledge that the path to successful treatment was by no means easy or risk free. Most chemotherapy and radiation treatments come at a high expense to the patient’s body—harming healthy cells right along with malicious cancer cells and putting patients at risk for other cancers or even other disease or health problems. While in the best circumstances the end result is permanent elimination of cancer, in too many instances a few cancer cells survive and lead to relapse. Immunotherapy offers the potential to allow the body to kill the remaining resistant tumor cells.
“The concept of using the body’s immune system to attack cancer has been around for many years, but attempts to show its effectiveness in treatment were hampered by a lack of sufficient understanding of the complexities of the immune system,” says Gordon D. Ginder, M.D., director of VCU Massey Cancer Center. “Recent advances in the basic understanding of how immune cells recognize cancer cells and how to overcome mechanisms that block their ability to kill cancer cells have opened a whole new chapter in immunotherapy.”
New findings regarding the immune system have brought optimism about potentially less toxic, less invasive and more successful treatments—the essence of which already exists within the patient’s own body. This line of research is called biological therapy or immunotherapy. Immunotherapy is defined by the National Cancer Institute as “treatment to boost or restore the ability of the immune system to fight cancer, infections and other diseases.” It can also be used to improve outcomes while lessening side effects of other treatments.
Researchers studying immunotherapy as it relates to cancer are exploring how the body’s immune system works to stop or slow the growth of cancer cells, destroy cancer cells and/or keep cancer cells from spreading. The better they understand how the immune system is supposed to work, the better they can improve or treat malfunctions in the system that allow cancer to grow. “Basically, immunotherapy uses the capabilities that already exist in the human body’s and makes them more effective at fighting cancer cells,” says Ginder. “This line of research offers great potential to improve cancer treatments while decreasing unwanted side effects. As such, it fits squarely with the goal of modern cancer therapy, which is find to find new ways to eliminate cancer more effectively and simultaneously offer better quality of life.”
At VCU Massey Cancer Center, immunotherapy has gained attention and funding across several research programs, including the Developmental Therapeutics, Cancer Molecular Genetics and Cancer Cell Signaling programs.
Developing a new “vaccine” for metastatic cancers
Massey researcher Xiang-Yang Wang, Ph.D., Harrison Scholar and member of the Cancer Molecular Genetics research program, has recently published results of a pre-clinical cutting-edge study in which an engineered immune modulator called Flagrp-170 was used to achieve localized vaccination on melanoma, prostate and colon tumors. Flagrp-170 consists of two distinct proteins. One of these proteins, known as Grp170, is currently being explored for use in the development of a “cancer vaccine,” because it has been shown to help the immune system recognize cancer cells that normally have the ability to suppress the body’s natural defense system. When combined with a fragment of another protein, flagellin, the immune system is activated in a unique way that promotes apoptosis, or cell suicide, in cancer cells.
Wang conducted a study that showed a positive response in animal models of melanoma, prostate and colon cancers. The study was recently published in Cancer Research, and Wang and his team continue to gain more understanding of the molecular mechanisms responsible for Flagrp-170’s therapeutic effects. Additional studies are underway that hope to efficiently target and deliver the mole