immunotherapy tagged posts

Researchers with the Snyder Institute for Chronic Diseases at the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM) have discovered which gut bacteria help our immune system battle cancerous tumours and how they do it. The discovery may provide a new understanding of why immunotherapy, a treatment for cancer that helps amplify the body’s immune response, works in some cases, but not others. The findings, published in Science, show combining immunotherapy with specific microbial therapy boosts the ability of the immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells in some melanoma, bladder and colorectal cancers.

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Scientists have found a vulnerability in cancer cells that could make them more susceptible to being destroyed by the immune system, according to a new report in eLife. The discovery could make it possible to circumvent the resistance starting to be seen with a new generation of immunotherapy treatments called checkpoint inhibitors.

Scientists have been heralding immunotherapy treatments as breakthroughs in cancer research as they have prolonged life in some people with previously untreatable cancers. However, not everyone responds to immunotherapy and recent studies suggest that some cancers are able to escape the effects of checkpoint inhibitor drugs...

Normal and cancerous pancreatic tissue. The blue background represents the cells that produce digestive juices supplied by the pancreas to the gut, and the red dots—seen only in the cancerous pancreas—represent the bacteria found to be a thousand times more abundant than normal.

Antibiotics may make immunotherapy more effective against pancreatic cancer. The population of bacteria in the pancreas increases more than a thousand fold in patients with pancreatic cancer, and becomes dominated by species that prevent the immune system from attacking tumor cells. These are the findings of a study conducted in mice and in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), a form of cancer that is usually fatal within two years...

Two images of EVIR-engineered dendritic cells (green) capturing tumor antigens in exosomes (gold/red). Cell nuclei are colored blue. Credit: C. Cianciaruso/M. De Palma/EPFL

Researchers at EPFL have created artificial molecules that can help the immune system to recognize and attack cancer tumors. Immunotherapies are breakthrough treatments that stimulate the patient’s immune cells to attack the tumor through the recognition of tumor antigens. They can be very effective, but currently can only cure a minority of patients with solid tumors. Researchers and physicians are now looking into ways of increasing the precision and strength of the immune attack on the tumor.

One approach is the “dendritic cell vaccine...