Therapy ‘alters immune cells’ to fight unresponsive tumours
10 Dec 2023
Finnish researchers say they have discovered how a new cancer therapy can alter the function of immune cells to enable them to infiltrate tumours previously unresponsive to treatment.
The scientists led by Maija Hollmén, working for Turku and Åbo Akademi universities' InFLAMES research programme, applied bexmarilimab to cultures of cancer cells and immune cells taken from patients. While cancers can utilise “highly plastic” macrophage white blood cells to escape detection by the immune system, bexmarilimab appeared to counter this.
“In a clinical trial for advanced-stage cancer, bexmarilimab therapy was well tolerated and stabilised disease progression in subsets of patients. In patients benefitting from the therapy, we observed tumour-associated macrophage and lymphocyte activation as well as induction of interferons, which are all important signs of anti-tumoral immune defence,” she explained.
Jenna Rannikko, first author of the research on the drug said bexmarilimab stimulated the macrophages, which then were able to stimulate T lymphocytes proficient in killing cancer cells. Successful treatment depended on cooperation by several immune cell types she added.
However, the team noticed that bexmarilimab was less effective against tumours which exposed macrophages to higher levels of interferons. Commenting on the work, Rannikko noted that those tumours resistant to current immunotherapies and susceptible to the new therapy had lower levels for interferons.
“This is highly significant, as it means that bexmarilimab would be most efficacious in tumours where currently available immunotherapies work poorly,” she said.
The research was published recently in Cell Reports Medicine and Cancer Immunology Research
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