California. Scientists have made a major breakthrough in the treatment of cancer. They’ve got a ‘kill switch’. Which is successful in killing cancer cells. ‘California Experts at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center in Sacramento say they have identified a protein that mimics a receptor that could be designed to kill cancer cells.
How will the therapy be given?
Researchers have named it CAR T-cell therapy. In which T cells will be collected from the patient’s blood and inserted into human genes in the lab. After which receptors called chimeric antigen receptors (CAR) are formed in the body. These cells are then put back into the patient’s bloodstream. “We have found the most important epitope for cytotoxic Fas signaling as well as CAR T-cell bystander anti-tumor function,” said senior author of the study, Jogender Tushir-Singh, associate professor in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology and senior author of the study.
How effective is this therapy?
So far this therapy has shown promising efficacy against serous cancers, leukemia and other blood cancers. According to scientists, it will be successful in treating solid tumors like breast cancer, lung and intestinal cancer. However, the team hopes that therapies can be developed to target solid cancers as well in the near future.
Modulating Fas Ovarian Cancer
Modulating Fas may also enhance the benefits of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for solid tumors such as ovarian cancer, the team said in its statement. At first we were not successful in identifying the receptor, but when we did further research and when we identified the epitope, we saw that it was showing a very positive response in treating tumor cancer.
