Adoptive Cell Transfer

Immunotherapy is an ever evolving and improving therapeutic approach. Namely get the bodies own cells to do the work. Adoptive Cell Therapy in a simple manner is taking T cells from a person, even at times NK cells, and then take the cancer cells and find the cell markers which the T cells can then respond to.

In reality it is very complex since one must identify the surface markers.The Guardian notes:

To create the treatment, doctors first cut small pieces of tissue from Perkins’s tumours and studied the DNA to find mutations specific to her cancer. They focused on mutations that disrupted four genes which produced an array of abnormal proteins in the tumours. ext, the doctors extracted immune cells known as tumour infiltrating lymphocytes, or TILs, from the tumour biopsies. These are cells from the patient’s immune system that have invaded the tumour in a bid to kill it, but which failed in the task by being either too weak or too few in number. After growing billions of these immune cells in the lab, the researchers screened them to find which ones would most effectively find and destroy the woman’s cancer cells by recognising their abnormal proteins.

The Nature article notes:

Immunotherapy using either checkpoint blockade or the adoptive transfer of antitumor lymphocytes has shown effectiveness in treating cancers with high levels of somatic mutations—such as melanoma, smoking-induced lung cancers and bladder cancer—with little effect in other common epithelial cancers that have lower mutation rates, such as those arising in the gastrointestinal tract, breast and ovary. Adoptive transfer of autologous lymphocytes that specifically target proteins encoded by somatically mutated genes has mediated substantial objective clinical regressions in patients with metastatic bile duct, colon and cervical cancers. We present a patient with chemorefractory hormone receptor (HR)-positive metastatic breast cancer who was treated with tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs) reactive against mutant versions of four proteins—SLC3A2, KIAA0368, CADPS2 and CTSB. Adoptive transfer of these mutant-protein-specific TILs in conjunction with interleukin (IL)-2 and checkpoint blockade mediated the complete durable regression of metastatic breast cancer, which is now ongoing for >22 months, and it represents a new immunotherapy approach for the treatment of these patients.

This is a complex and patient specific approach. Targeting the cancer cells, training the T cells and re-perfusion is time consuming and highly expensive. However in time this may prove to be highly effective and readily automated.

Now as a side note, I believe that this work is infinitely more productive than coding for social media!