The science revolving around cancer having the capability to reverse itself, seems like one of magic, unbelievable. But just as there are moments of seemingly magical occurrences, the ability of malignant cells to gain control of its growth and simply get rid of its cancer-like behavior is very much possible.
“Cell-based therapies hold tremendous promise for delivering therapeutic agents to tumors and may provide treatment options where standard therapy has failed," Shah, an associate professor of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s and director of the Center for Stem Cell Therapeutics and Imaging at HMS said. "With our technique, we show it is possible to reverse engineer a patient’s own cancer cells and use them to treat cancer. We think this has many implications and could be applicable across all cancer cell types.”
The team of researchers and experimentalists at Harvard developed and tested two techniques to harness the power of cancer cells. The “off the shelf” technique used pre-engineered tumor cells that would need to be matched to a patient’s HLA phenotype (essentially, a person’s immune fingerprint). The “autologous” approach used CRISPR technology to edit the genome of a patient’s cancer cells and insert therapeutic molecules. These cells could then be transferred back into the patient.
This is looked at as an opportunity for a cancer patient to be relieved from the pressure and efforts of undergoing chemotherapy and multiple other options that put a lot of pressure on them to heal, an opportunity, a natural idea that requires nothing more than effort from the patient and other necessities makes cancer seem as easy to defeat as a common cold.
Although this is now very efficient, undergoing research at its base levels, in the up and coming years we would be seeing a lot of results. The team saw direct migration of engineered cells to the sites of tumors and found evidence that the engineered cells specifically targeted and killed recurrent and metastatic cancer in the mice. The researchers report that the treatment increased survival in the mice. As basic as animal testing goes, it is a huge improvement from theories.
One likely reason for spontaneous regression is that the body triggers an immune response against specific antigens displayed on the surface of tumor cells. Support for this idea comes from the observation that some skin tumors (malignant melanoma) show excessively high numbers of the body's immune cells inside the tumor. Neuroblastoma is a type of rare childhood cancer that could shed some light on how genetic changes may affect spontaneous regression. For instance, these tumors typically have high numbers of a cell receptor (TrkA) which can trigger tumor cells to kill themselves. Developing animal models that mimic human spontaneous regression would be an invaluable tool towards this.
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