United States: Scientists at the Uppsala University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology have created a new form of medicine that could help treat different types of cancer. This medicine is almost a type of an antibody, which is like a very special protein that can help the immune system fight cancer.
The researchers combined three important functions into this antibody, making it even stronger at helping T cells (a type of immune cell) attack cancer tumors. This exciting discovery was shared in a study published in Nature Communications.
We have been researching on precision medicine for almost one and a half decade as well as trying to understand how we can use antibodies to modulate an important key protein (CD40) in the immune system.
As reported by the Medicalxpress, this means that we can now demonstrate that the new antibody method acts as precise targeted therapy treatment for cancer,” said main author of the study, and lead investigator Sara Mangsbo, a professor at the Department of Pharmacy, Uppsala University, and Johan Rockberg, a professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm University.
The drug is designed to enable the immune system to focus on targeting mutations and other changes found only in cancer known as neoantigens. This is accomplished by the new antibody both providing the specific tumor-associated material in a targeted manner to a certain type of immune cell and at the same time activating this cell, which in turn possesses the potential for a strong boosting of the T-cell reactivity against the tumor.
That is why the results obtained through the application of the method can be described as follows. It not only triggers the correct sort of immune cells in human blood samples, but also results in mice that received the pseudo treatment live longer, and at an even higher concentration help the mice to fight cancer, and that the method is safer than previous anticancer therapies the scientists have investigated.
Personalized therapeutic intervention is expensive and time consuming in terms of value addition for their formulation.
However, one major advantage of our drug is that in terms of large-scale production is fairly easy but can be formulated specifically for the disease the patient is suffering from or the particular tumor type.
One part of the medicine is a targeting bispecific antibody, which can be produced beforehand on a large scale, another is a custom peptide part, which is synthesized in a lab in small quantities and on request for a particular type of cancer, according to Johan Rockberg, a Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology.