Cancer fighter
Dr. Alicja Copik, a researcher at UCF’s Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences, wants to find out if natural killer cells can be used against cancer.
To say that Dr. Alicja Copik is fascinated with natural killer cells is an understatement.
“As you learn more about them and see them in action … now it’s my life,” said Copik, a researcher at the University of Central Florida’s Burnett School of Biomedical Sciences. “I breathe and sleep natural killer cells.”
Natural killer cells make up a small part of our immune system. They’re one of the body’s first lines of defense against cells that are deemed to be dangerous.
A biochemist by training, Copik has been studying these cells for the past decade to try to harness their power to fight cancer.
She has patented a technology that supersizes natural killer cells, she’s helped establish a company that’s launching clinical trials using the technology, and now she’s combining the energized natural killer cells with new immunotherapy drugs in hopes of finding treatments for more cancer patients.
“To fight the enemy, you need to have more soldiers,” Copik said.
When natural killer cells are resting, they circulate in the blood. But when activated, they travel into surrounding tissue to kill cells that are infected with a virus or are cancerous. They are also necessary for tumor surveillance and control.
“Mutations in our body happen all the time, yet we’re not developing cancer,” said Copik. “So we have those mechanisms to keep it at check. That’s how we know that our immune system is one of the best tools that we have.”
But in some cases, through processes that are not wellunderstood, cancer cells overpower our immune system and start their uncontrolled growth. Although the body makes its own natural killer cells, it doesn’t make enough of them to fight a raging cancerous tumor.
Scientists have long recognized natural killer cells for their potential to treat cancer and there’s a rapidly-growing body of research about them, but none of the studies have led to treatment so far.
Some researchers have successfully stimulated and multiplied natural killer cells by exposing them to living cancer cells — engineered leukemia cells called feeder cells — but those studies, even though groundbreaking, have faced challenges in clinical trials.
Copik decided to take a different approach.
She knew that natural killer cells respond to certain proteins on the feeder cells only, so she didn’t need the entire living feeder cell to stimulate natural killer cells.
“And I thought why can’t we make particles from the membrane of feeder cells and use that?” Copik said.
As she had hoped, the resulting nonliving nanoparticles not only stimulated natural killer cells and significantly increased their numbers, but also they increased the cells’ cancer-killing ability.
“Alicja is one of the most innovative people in the field,” said Dr. Robert Igarashi, one of the co-founders of Florida startup CytoSen Therapeutics and a former UCF assistant professor. “I think her diverse background allows her to take
the problems from a slightly different angle [than others in the field].”
Igarashi and five others, including Copik, co-founded CytoSen in late 2015. The company licensed Copik’s technology in 2016 and Igarashi eventually left his post at UCF to run the company and focus on taking the technology to clinical trials for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia.
Copik currently has a confidential contract (sponsored research agreement) with CytoSen.
“One of the highlights of [Copik’s] work is that her discoveries not only help us with understanding [natural killer cells], but they’re also functional and can be transformed into therapies that can be widely used,” said Igarashi.
Copik, a native of Poland, arrived in the U.S. 20 years ago. After completing her Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellowships, she worked at Florida Hospital for two years, where she began studying natural killer cells, and then moved to UCF.
Her obsession with natural killer cells and their potential to fight cancer took a more personal turn a few years ago when her mother was diagnosed with breast and then colon cancer.
“After my mom’s [colon] surgery, we had Christmas dinner and I thought it would be the last time I saw her,” said Copik. “She’s now 77 and is still here. And I want to have treatments that will give people another Christmas and another Christmas and not die of cancer. That’s not the way anyone should be dying.”
Separately from CytoSen, Copik has continued to study this small subpopulation of immune cells to harness every bit of the cells’ power to fight cancer.
In her most recent project, she and her team at UCF are trying to find out whether approved immunotherapy drugs — including the type that helped treat President Jimmy Carter’s melanoma — can help treat a larger number of patients when used in combination with her energized natural killer cells.
The key to her theory lies in a molecule called PD-L1, Copik explained.
Cancer cells use PD-L1 as a protective signal and trick our immune system into thinking that they’re not the enemy.
Anti-PD-L1 immunotherapy drugs work by attaching themselves to the PD-L1 molecules to block their action and in turn make the tumor visible to the body’s immune system.
But less than 20 percent of cancer patients have cells that carry PD-L1, which means that the anti-PD-L1 drugs are ineffective for most cancer patients whose tumors don’t carry PD-L1.
That’s where Copik and her natural killer cells come in.
Natural killer cells induce cancer cells to produce PD-L1 and make them a target for the anti-PD-L1 immunotherapy drugs. The NK cells working in combination with the anti-PD-L1 drugs can be more effective.
Other groups also found that natural killer cells, once inside and killing the cancer cells, recruit other immune cells and further boost the body’s attack on tumors.
Copik published her findings in a paper in August in the OncoImmunology journal, reporting that combining natural killer cells with the new immunotherapy drugs led to improved survival rates in animal models with ovarian cancer.
It’s too soon to tell whether the combination will work in humans. Only future clinical trials can reveal that.