Scientists use ‘Trojan horse’ in fight against cancer
PUBLISHED : Thursday, 02 June, 2016, 11:11pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 02 June, 2016, 11:11pm
Agence France-Presse
German researchers have revealed a Trojan horse method of attacking cancer, by sneaking virus impersonators into the *human body to unleash an anti-tumour immune offensive.
The treatment is said to be the latest advance in immunotherapy and uses the body’s own immune army against disease.
Made in a lab, the Trojan horse is composed of nanoparticles containing cancer RNA – a form of genetic coding – enclosed by a fatty acid membrane.
The particles are injected into patients to simulate a virus invasion and infiltrate immune cells. The cells decode the RNA and trigger cancer antigen production.
The antigens activate cancer-fighting T cells, priming the body for an anti-tumour assault.
Three people with skin cancer were given low doses of the treatment. All developed a “strong” immune response, the team *reported in the journal Nature.
If further trials find the therapy works, they added, it could pave the way to a “universal” treatment against all cancer types.
The new treatment is called an RNA vaccine and works just like a preventive vaccine by mimicking an infectious agent and training the body to respond to it.
“Impressively, immune responses were observed” in the three patients, experts Jolanda de Vries and Carl Figdor of the Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen in the Netherlands wrote in an analysis, also published by Nature. But they said, “it is still early days, and a larger, randomised trial will be needed”.
Immunotherapy is already used to treat some cancers, but there is no universal vaccine.
Cancer cells are not intruders but our own cells gone haywire due to DNA damage, which explains why they can circulate undisturbed by the immune system.
Finding drugs that can kill diseased cells without harming healthy ones has proven difficult.
Chemotherapy, for example, targets fast-dividing cells – good and bad alike.
