Scientists Find a Potential Cure for Cancer

Scientists from Harvard, MIT and University College London have made a discovery about the genetics of cancer tumors that could offer a new way to deliver customized immunotherapy drugs to kill all types of cancer, including the most complex such as melanoma and lung cancer. Currently, it is difficult to treat cancer effectively because as cancer tumors grow, they mutate into a mixture of many kinds of rogue cells that behave differently from one another. But, the researchers have found that even as the cells mutate, each still produces distinct “flags,” or antigens, that appear on the surface of the tumor’s cells. As one of the scientists explained: “A tumor’s evolutionary tree is like a snowflake, unique for each patient. These tumors develop new branches with genetic mutations, and these mutations resist treatment. But the ‘trunk’ of this tree contains these flag proteins, and each branch that grows out of this trunk contains the same flag.”

Finding these unique flags, deemed the “Achilles heel” of cancer, is the key for treatment to completely kill the cancer. Because an antigen has to be present on all tumor cells, identifying these unique flags will pave the way for treatments that would activate T cells to target and attack all tumor cells at once. “This opens up a way to look at individual patients’ tumors and profile all the antigen variations to figure out the best ways for immunotherapy treatments to work, prioritizing antigens present in every tumor cell and identifying the body’s immune T cells that recognize them,” says the study’s co-author Charles Swanton from the University College London Cancer Institute.

While the findings have not yet been used to treat live patients, the researchers say they hope to launch a study in lung cancer patients in the next two to three years. The study was published in the journal Science.