Future ‘incredibly bright’ for crusade against cancer
‘We’re seeing impressive results with cells called natural killer cells’
Scientists have discovered a breakthrough treatment to fight cancer, and claim the disease will no longer be deadly for future generations.
Researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London believe it’s possible to strengthen the body’s defences by transplanting immune cells from strangers. Patients will begin to receive the new treatment next year, and the team now wants to establish “immune banks” to store disease-fighting cells.
Prof Adrian Hayday, an immunology expert and group leader of the immunosurveillance laboratory at The Crick, said scientists and doctors could become more like engineers, upgrading the body rather than bombarding it with toxic chemotherapy.
“Using the immune system to fight cancer is the ultimate do-it-yourself approach,” he said. “Even a few years ago the notion that any clinician would look at a patient and deliver a therapy which wasn’t going to directly affect the cancer in any way, would have been pretty radical. But that’s what’s happening.
“We’re seeing impressive results with cells called natural killer cells. It’s very early days but there are patients receiving them in this next year, and the nice feature is, unlike other immunotherapy, these cells aren’t rejected.
“So you have the possibility of developing cell banks that could be used for anyone. You would call them up and deliver them to the clinic just hours before they needed to be infused. We’re not quite there yet.
“But that’s what we’re trying now. There is every capability of getting cell banks like this established.”
Until this year, scientists thought it would be impossible to import a stranger’s immune cells as the immunosuppressant drugs needed to ensure the body didn’t reject them, would cancel out the benefits. But in 2018, scientists realised that immune cells are unlike other cells, and can survive well in another person, opening the door to transplants.
About 350,000 people are diagnosed with cancer each year, and 30 years ago just one in four would have survived for 10 years.
But radical advances over the past decade have seen the number of people surviving for at least a decade rise to 50% and the team at The Crick want to make that 75% in the next 15 years. Prof Charlie Swanton, of the Cancer Evolution and Genome Instability Laboratory, said the ability now to sequence tumours was heralding a new era of medicine tailor-made for a patient.
“It’s a very exciting time. The technology available to us now is just incredible. We’re able to sequence the genome of a tumour, understand its micro-environment, how it metabolises, what cells are controlling it, and how those can be manipulated.
“Using the body’s own immune cells to target the tumour is elegant because tumours evolve so quickly there’s no way a pharmaceutical company can keep up with it, but the immune system has been evolving for four billion years to do just that.”
Tumours evolve in a branched way, like trees, but scientists have recently found immune cells in their “trunks“, which could be crucial to battling the disease from the base up. Next year, Swanton’s team will begin trials to see if ramping up those specific cells could be effective in fighting lung cancer.
“We will be expanding those immune cells from the patient’s tumour in the lab and giving them back to the patient in hopefully overwhelming numbers to tackle the tumour at its trunk.
“It’s personalised medicine taken to the absolute extreme. Each patient has a unique therapy – it’s pretty much impossible to have the same treatment because no two tumours are the same.” The team is also studying a group known as “elite controllers”, who have genetic mutations that prevent them getting cancer. In mice which have been genetically engineered to have the same mutations, it’s almost impossible to induce skin cancer.
“A pivotal breakthrough in HIV was the recognition of people with elite controllers who had mutations in receptors which rendered them resistant to infection and that changed the landscape utterly,” added Hayday. “We have a group in Sardinia who have a conspicuously low rate of cancers. Despite the suffering that continues to plague the oncology wards, and family and friends, the basis for optimism is extraordinary.
“I would go so far as to say that we might reach a point, maybe in 20 years, where most cancers are rapidly treated diseases or longterm chronic issues you can manage.
“And I think the immune system will be essential in doing that. Between 1980 and 2010, 519,000 cancer deaths were avoided because of cancer research. If that’s not a note for optimism I don’t know what is.”
Swanton said: “Bear in mind 30 years ago that was one in four so survival has doubled in my lifetime and I think it will double again over the next 30 years. The future is incredibly bright.” –