New breakthrough treatment boosts cancer-fighting cells

By Stephen Beech via SWNS

A way to safely boost immune cells to fight cancer - avoiding harmful side effects such as hair loss - has been developed.

American scientists devised the ground-breaking immunotherapy to localize cancer-killing cytokines in tumors, improving the effectiveness of current treatments.

Immunotherapy involves harnessing the power of the body’s immune system to fight potentially deadly cancer cells.

Now, researchers at Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering have found a way to revamp a treatment procedure into an innovative practice.

Chemical engineering Professor Rong Tong teamed up with materials science and engineering Professor Wenjun "Rebecca" Cai to develop a new cancer immunotherapy treatment.

Their approach involves activating the immune cells in the body and "reprogramming" them to attack and destroy the cancer cells.

The method is frequently implemented with the protein cytokine.

Tong explained that cytokines are small protein molecules that act as "intercellular biochemical messengers" and are released by the body's immune cells to coordinate their response.

He said: “Cytokines are potent and highly effective at stimulating the immune cells to eliminate cancer cells.

“The problem is they’re so potent that if they roam freely throughout the body, they’ll activate every immune cell they encounter, which can cause an overactive immune response and potentially fatal side effects.”

The Virginia Tech team has developed a new approach to employ cytokine proteins as a potential immunotherapy treatment.

Unlike previous methods, their technique ensures that the immune cell-stimulating cytokines effectively localize within the tumors for weeks while preserving the cytokine’s structure and reactivity levels.

Current cancer treatments - such as chemotherapy - can't distinguish between healthy cells and cancer cells.

Tong explained that when someone with cancer undergoes chemotherapy, the treatment attacks all of the cells in their body, which can lead to unpleasant side effects including hair loss and fatigue.

But he said stimulating the body’s immune system to attack tumors is a "promising" alternative to treat cancer.

Tong says the delivery of cytokines can "jump-start" immune cells in the tumor, but overstimulating healthy cells can cause severe side effects.

He said: “Scientists determined a while ago that cytokines can be used to activate and fight against tumors, but they didn’t know how to localize them inside the tumor while not exposing toxicity to the rest of the body.

“Chemical engineers can look at this from an engineering approach and use their knowledge to help refine and elevate the effectiveness of the cytokines so they can work inside the body effectively.”

The research team’s goal is to strike a balance between killing cancer cells in the body and sparing healthy cells.

Tong and his colleagues created specialized particles with distinctive sizes that help determine where the drug is going.

The microparticles are designed to stay within the tumor environment after being injected into the body.

Cai and her students worked on measuring the particles’ surface properties.

She said: “In the field of materials science and engineering, we study the surface chemistry and mechanical behavior of materials, such as the specialized particle created for this project.

“Surface engineering and characterization, along with particle size, play important roles in controlled drug delivery, ensuring prolonged drug presence and sustained therapeutic effectiveness.”

Tong said: “Our strategy not only minimizes cytokine-induced harm to healthy cells but also prolongs cytokine retention within the tumor.

“This helps facilitate the recruitment of immune cells for targeted tumor attack.”

He says the next step involves combining the new, localized cytokine therapy method with commercially available, Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved checkpoint blockade antibodies, which reactivate the tumor immune cells that have been silenced so they can fight back the cancer cells.

Tong said: “When there is a tumor inside the body, the body’s immune cells are being deactivated by the cancer cells.

“The FDA-approved checkpoint blocking antibody helps 'take off the brakes' that tumors put on immune cells, while the cytokine molecules 'step on the gas' to jump-start the immune system and get an immune cell army to fight cancer cells. These two approaches work together to activate immune cells.”

Combining the checkpoint antibodies with the particle-anchored cytokine proved to successfully eliminate many tumors in the study, published in the journal Science Advances.

The Virginia Tech team believes the new approach of attaching cytokines to particles also could be used in the future to deliver other types of immunostimulatory drugs.

Tong said: “Researchers are still looking for safer and more effective cancer treatments.

“This motivation is what drives us to develop new technologies in the field.

"The whole class of drugs that are employed to jump-start the immune system to fight cancer cells has largely not yet succeeded.

"Our goal is to create novel solutions that allow researchers to test these drugs with existing FDA-approved therapeutics, ensuring both safety and enhanced efficacy.”

Cai added: “I view this project as a perfect marriage between chemical engineering and materials science.

“The former focuses on the synthesis and drug delivery part, the latter on applying advanced materials characterization.

"This collaboration not only accelerates immunotherapy research but also has the ability to transform cancer treatment.”