MR1 as a Broad Signature of Cancer, Suitable for T Cell Targeting

Meaningful progress towards the control of cancer, ending it as a major threat to life and health, will be led by programs that can produce very broadly applicable treatments. That means therapies that can be applied to many (or even all) cancers with minimal differences in configuration or need for further per-cancer development. There are hundreds of cancer subtypes, but only so many researchers, and only so much funding for research and development: development of highly specific therapies is just not an effective path forward. Examples of the most promising lines of work with broad application include the OncoSenX suicide gene therapy targeting p53 expression, interference in telomere lengthening, and blocking immune inhibitors such as CD47 that cancer cells use to evade the immune system. Researchers here report on another possible approach, a very broad cell surface signature of cancer that might be used to build chimeric antigen receptor T cell immunotherapies that can be applied to a very wide range of cancers indeed. T-cell therapies for cancer - where immune cells are removed, modified and returned to the patient's blood to seek and destroy cancer cells - are the latest paradigm in cancer treatments. The most widely-used therapy, known as CAR-T, is personalised to each patient but targets only a few types of cancers and has not been successful for solid tumours, which make up the vast majority of cancers. Researchers have now discovered T-cells equi...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Daily News Source Type: blogs