Researchers have long hoped to corral the immune system in the war on cancer. Now, antibody-based compounds show new promise.
For years, researchers have longingly eyed the human immune system as a potentially powerful weapon against cancer. Yet while the prospect of getting the body’s antibodies and immune cells to seek and destroy cancer — the same way they do bacteria and viruses — seems like a home run in theory, it hasn’t proven to be very reliable.
The reason has to do with the very nature of cancer itself: cancer cells aren’t invaders, but healthy cells gone rogue. So, targeting tumors often means having to target innocent, healthy tissue as well. That’s why cancer vaccines and immune-based treatments have had such mixed success.
But last weekend, at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), researchers reported on a promising advance: Dr. Kimberly Blackwell, director of the breast cancer program at the Duke Cancer Institute, said that she and her colleagues had successfully treated 991 women with advanced and metastatic breast cancer with an innovative “smart bomb” of a therapy, an antibody designed to bind only to tumor cells and then deliver its killer payload, an uberpowerful toxin, to destroy them. The idea is eloquently simple, yet, says Blackwell, it was a dozen years in the making.
The key was finding a way to ferry the toxin straight to breast cancer cells while bypassing healthy tissues along the way. The answer was an antibody that recognizes a protein called HER2 on certain breast cancers. Once attached to the HER2 on the cancer, the antibody and its partner toxin enter the cell where the antibody is broken down, releasing the toxin to destroy the cell from the inside out.
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