Tailored cancer fight down to a T

A DISCOVERY by Melbourne scientists may pave the way for a promising new form of cancer treatment to one day be tailored to a patient’s age, improving its effectiveness in older people.

The therapy, where a patient’s own cells are genetically modified to boost their cancerkilling capacity, is having remarkable results in young cancer patients, but its success is limited in the elderly.

More than 60 per cent of new cancer cases in Australia occur in people aged over 60 and there is a desperate need for better ways to treat the elderly population.

The new findings by Monash University’s Biomedical Discovery Institute sheds light on why people lose their ability to fight infections as they age.

Professor Nicole La Gruta and Dr Kylie Quinn’s new re- search finds that as we age some of our killer T-cells, which are expert cancer killers, reduce dramatically in number and others become dysfunctional.

“We think dysfunction in one population of killer T-cells and the reduction in number of healthy T-cells contributes to the rising rates of infection and cancer in old age,” Prof La Gruta said.

CAR T-cell therapy is one of the most exciting cancer treatments emerging, Dr Quinn said.

“It involves taking killer Tcells from a cancer patient, genetically modifying them, building them up into large numbers and putting them back in the patient,” Dr Quinn said.

Their studies in mice and humans sheds light on why this occurs and may eventually allow for treatment to be tailored to a person’s age.