Helping tired lymphocytes
A new target for the development of a cancer vaccine has been opened
Georgy Golovanov, Hi-tech+
Over the past ten years, scientists have begun to develop experimental vaccines that stimulate the patient's immune system to destroy a cancerous tumor. So far, none of them has been approved by the sanitary supervision authorities, but some show good results in clinical trials. MIT experts have found that vaccination against certain cancer proteins can enhance the T-cell response and reduce the tumor volume in mice.
When cells begin to turn cancerous, they produce mutated proteins that are not characteristic of healthy ones. These so-called neoantigens can signal to the immune system that something is going wrong, and T cells begin to destroy cancer cells. However, gradually T-cells become susceptible to "fatigue", which occurs when a tumor creates an immune-suppressive environment that neutralizes T-cells.
Scientists hope that the vaccine will be able to rejuvenate these T cells and help them further attack cancer. Previous studies have shown that out of hundreds of neoantigens in most tumors, only a small number provoke a T-cell reaction, writes MIT News.
Experts from MIT helped to understand why this is so. In a model of mice with lung cancer, they showed that when T cells appear, subsets of T cells targeting different cancer proteins compete with each other. This leads to the emergence of a dominant population of T cells. And even after the T cells become tired, they continue to suppress competitors.
However, as scientists have found out, if mice are vaccinated with one of the neoantigens, suppressed T cells can be rejuvenated, giving them new strength to fight cancer. In this case, the size of the tumor in rodents is reduced by an average of 27%.
After vaccination, the population of T cells is replenished with the type that is able to re-stimulate the response of the immune system, that is, to ensure long-term control of the tumor.
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