Sudhakar Jha
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Written By: Sudhakar Jha | Published : September 2, 2018 9:34 AM IST
According to the American Cancer Society (ACS), ovarian cancer is the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths in women © Shutterstock
A team of researchers, headed by an Indian origin professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, have developed a dual antibody approach that could kill ovarian cancer cells, and might be able to other types of cancers too.
According to Dr. Jogender Tushir Singh, the lead researcher, one of the major problems with immune therapies for ovarian cancer was that the immune cells intended to kill the cancer cells could not penetrate the solid tumour cushion that surrounds the cells effectively.
And that made the team engineer an antibody that they are calling a "two-headed arrow". According to them, while, one head would strike what is known as the death receptor on the cancer cells, killing them in the process, the other head would strike a receptor known as FOLR1, a marker of a poor prognosis.
Dr. Jogender said that though there were a lot of efforts in terms of cancer immune therapy, their success is limited in solid tumours. And he found that one of the problems was with the solid tumour microenvironment.
He explained that the microenvironment was highly hypoxic, anergic and, particularly in the case of ovarian cancer, some unusually large receptors form a protective barrier around tumour cells, so even if the immune cells reach there, there face a lot of obstacles in killing the cells.
The team is claiming that the newly-engineered antibodies are over 100 times more effective at killing cancer cells than the antibodies that have been clinically tested till date. They also explain that the approach also avoided toxicity issues that had plagued previous antibody therapies.
Liver toxicity has been the biggest problem for a lot of antibodies they are taken out of the blood too fast and accumulate where not needed. But by providing a good home for the antibodies in the tumour, they are keeping those antibodies away from the liver, he concluded.
