دراسة أمريكية تتوصل لعلاج مناعي جاهز يتحدى أشرس أنواع سرطان الثدي

In a step that could change the course of combating one of the most aggressive types of breast cancer, researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, announced the development of a new immunotherapy that relies on modified body defense cells, capable of attacking cancer cells from multiple angles and dismantling the protective shields that these cells build to defend themselves.

This therapy is known as "modified NKT immune cell therapy," and it is specifically designed to target triple-negative breast cancer, which lacks three key targets that make other types of cancer more treatable, allowing it to spread quickly and recur at a high rate even after traditional treatments such as chemotherapy or surgery.

A More Effective Treatment

The study, conducted by a team led by Professor Lily Yang, a professor of microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics at the university, showed that this treatment is more effective than current immunotherapies in destroying tumor samples taken from patients in advanced stages of the disease, as it targets a protein called mesothelin that is abundantly present on the surface of cells of this type of cancer.

Saves Time and Money

The treatment relies on a rare and powerful type of natural immune cells known as "fixed NKT cells," which are genetically modified to carry specific receptors that enable them to recognize and attack cancer cells in three simultaneous ways: releasing chemical signals that activate other defensive cells in the body, destroying the inflammatory barriers that protect the tumor, and secreting substances that inhibit the growth and spread of cancer cells.

What distinguishes this treatment from previous methods is the ability to produce it in advance from donated blood stem cells, without the need to extract cells from each patient individually, thus saving time and costs; instead of a costly process that can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars and take weeks, thousands of doses can be produced from a single donation at an estimated cost of about $5,000 per dose.

Clinical Trials Approaching

Yang stated in a university statement: "Patients have long awaited better treatment options, and being just one step away from starting clinical trials is very encouraging."

The study conducted experiments on animal models and human cells, where the modified cells showed the ability to survive in the body for longer periods without provoking an immune reaction against them, making them safe and effective for widespread use.

This discovery comes at a time when triple-negative breast cancer poses a significant challenge, affecting about 15% of breast cancer cases in women, with a greater impact on young women and racial minorities, having a five-year survival rate of no more than 77% in advanced stages, compared to 93% for other types, according to the American National Cancer Institute.

Unlike traditional treatments that often fail to penetrate the resistant immune environment of the tumor, this therapy represents a step toward a "ready-to-use treatment" that can be distributed in hospitals like any other medication, potentially expanding its scope to include other types of solid tumors such as lung or pancreatic cancer.