Immunotherapies can boost the immune system’s ability to fight off cancer cells. Immune checkpoints are regulators of the immune system, which are pivotal in preventing the body from attacking healthy cells indiscriminately.
‘Nanotherapeutic delivery system boosts immune systems ability to fight off cancer cells.’
Some types of cancer circumvent these checkpoints, allowing cancerous cells to avoid detection and continue to spread.
Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) is a newer therapy that can essentially release the brakes on the immune system and help the body fight back. ICB therapies are effective for some types of cancer, but they don’t work for every patient.
Recent research has focused on ways to enhance the power of ICB therapies by combining them with chemotherapeutic agents such as camptothecin. Though camptothecin is potent, it is also unstable, has poor solubility in water, and can have serious side effects for healthy cells.
The research team created the first nanotherapeutic platform of its kind to overcome these hurdles. Using a nanotechnology delivery method, researchers enhanced camptothecin’s ability to synergize with ICB therapies, making them more effective against aggressive tumors.
As a result, this nanotherapeutic platform was able to increase the effectiveness of the ICB therapy to eradicate a large portion of early-stage colorectal cancer tumors while concurrently activating the body’s memory immunity, and preventing tumor recurrence.
Researchers also noted that their nanotechnology platform can be used to deliver a range of cancer therapeutics, and it has a significant head start in the drug development pipeline as it is derived from sphingomyelin, a lipid that is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
These findings are published in Nature Nanotechnology.They also hope to collaborate with oncologists at the UArizona Cancer Center to further optimize the nanotherapeutic system to make it suitable for an early phase clinical trial.
Source: Medindia
