The world scientific community is waging a difficult and prolonged war
on cancer. New research in the field of immunogenic cell death can extend the
area of drugs application and ensure patients’ protection from relapse after
therapy.
Cancer treatment
is not just the removal of the tumor cells from the body, and chemotherapy. The
doctors’ aim is to provide a scenario that would prevent tumor cells from
proliferating and causing a new disease.
For many years,
scientists at the Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod and the
University of Ghent (Belgium) have been engaged in research aimed to minimize
the harm to the body after cancer treatment and have been looking for new
approaches to treating cancer patients.
The project,
supported by a grant from the Russian Science Foundation and headed by Dmitry
Krys’ko, leading researcher of the Lobachevsky University’s Institute of
Biology and Biomedicine, professor at Ghent University, has yielded its first
major results.
According to
Professor Dmitry Krys’ko, the existing anti-cancer therapy (chemotherapy,
radiation therapy and photodynamic therapy) causes great damage to the body as
a whole, while his team’s research is aimed at the stimulation of immunogenic
cell death, which not only minimizes the damage, but also enhances the efficacy
of treatment by involving the body’s resources in the fight against cancer.
“In this study,
we tested some drugs for anticancer therapy based on photodynamic treatment and
investigated their new immunogenic properties. We can say that not only the
external impact will be used to fight cancer, but also the body itself will
engage in the fight by triggering the reactions of the adaptive immune
response.
The concept of
immunogenic cell death (ICD) includes a programmed death of cancer cells with
subsequent release of molecules that give a danger signal to the immune system.
We tested the drugs that are already used in cancer therapy, and enhanced the
action of these agents,” said Professor Krys’ko.
The study
employed a number of methods and approaches that were used in in vitro and in
vivo experiments. At the laboratories of Lobachevsky University and the
University of Ghent, researchers studied how substances accumulate in the cell,
analyzed cell death types when cells were exposed to photosensitizers, and
revealed molecular mechanisms of the phenomena that occur to the cells in the
process of their death.
“In this study,
we examined the cellular-level response of dendritic cells (immune system
components) in their interaction with cancer cells that were exposed to
photodynamic therapy (PDT) and proved that photodynamic therapy can activate
the body’s own immune response,” said Victoria Turubanova, research assistant
of the Department of General and Medical Genetics at the UNN Institute of
Biology and Biomedicine.
The researchers
have examined additional aspects of the use of existing drugs for developing
new cancer protocols based on the stimulation of the immune system. Such
variants of therapy reduce the risk of metastasis and enhance the effectiveness
of the patient’s recovery.
A series of
experiments on laboratory mice was performed, resulting in an important
conclusion that the cellular vaccine prepared from dying cancer cells protects
the mouse from cancer by preventing tumor development in the body.
Based on the results obtained, the researchers have published their
article «Immunogenic cell death induced by a new photodynamic therapy based on
Photosens and Photodithazine» in the BMC Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer (with
the impact factor of 8.67), which describes new variants of photosensitizers
that cause immunogenic cell death of cancer cells.
Journal article: https://jitc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40425-019-0826-3
Source: https://myfusimotors.com/2020/01/03/scientists-find-a-new-use-for-already-known-anti-cancer-drugs/
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