An Update on Leukocyte Transfer Cancer Therapy Development

LIFT, or GIFT, is an approach to cancer therapy that involves transplantation of suitably aggressive leukocyte or granulocyte immune cells. While cancers have numerous ways to suppress the native immune response, they can be vulnerable to foreign immune cells from a donor. Not all donors, but perhaps a few in a hundred on average will have immune cells capable of rapidly destroying a patient's cancer. In principle this approach should be able to target many different types of cancer, which is exactly what we need to see from the research community: more of broadly applicable approaches, and less of very specific cancer therapies. There are only so many researchers and far too many subtypes of cancer. If we are to see meaningful progress in the decades ahead, it must be through classes of treatment that can effectively tackle many different types of cancer, or even all cancers. GIFT in its original incarnation performed very well in mice, but movement towards human trials has been painfully slow for all of the standard reasons: the regulatory system doesn't like it when a scientist can't explain the exact mechanisms by which a proposed therapy works; the immune system's interaction with cancer is enormously complex, making it expensive and time-consuming to establish any of the relevant mechanisms; it can take years for researchers to learn the ropes when it comes to starting companies and raising venturing funding; it usually takes years to make all of the connections ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Healthy Life Extension Community Source Type: blogs