Scientists have new hope in the fight against cancer after finding a treatment which works better than chemotherapy.
Powerful chemotherapy drugs are given to patients to destroy tumours but often fail to complete the job.
The gruelling treatment, which leads to hair loss, fatigue and sickness, does not kill all of the tumour’s cells.
It means that some patients, who have been given the all clear, will see their cancer return.
Scientists have new hope in the fight against cancer after finding a treatment which works better than chemotherapy
But scientists exploring the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how cancer ravages the body say they have found a way to prompt the immune system into helping to fight the disease.
They have knocked out a protein in the body which enables chemotherapy to kill tumour cells ‘silently’ without the body noticing.
The new form of chemotherapy acts as a red flag to the immune system, which kicks in to kill the remaining cancer cells so that the tumour is completely destroyed.
It has only been proven to work in the lab, using human cells, but trials on people are hoped to start within five years.
The researchers say a new drug could be available for Britain’s 356,000 cancer patients within a decade.
Dr Justine Alford, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK, which funded the research led by the Beatson Institute in Glasgow, said: ‘Although many cancer treatments work by triggering apoptosis (cell death), that method sometimes fails to finish the job and instead may lead to the tumour becoming harder to treat.
‘This new research suggests there could be a better way to kill cancer cells which, as an added bonus, also activates the immune system. Now scientists need to investigate this idea further and, if further studies confirm it is effective, develop ways to trigger this particular route of cell death in humans.’
Scientists exploring the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how cancer ravages the body say they have found a way to prompt the immune system into helping to fight the disease
Chemotherapy and radiotherapy destroy tumours by triggering apoptosis, or programmed cell death. But this cell death happens naturally all the time, in billions of cells within the human body, and so the immune system does not realise anything unusual is happening.
The researchers hope to develop a new drug which will cause a tumour’s cells to die much more slowly.
This unusual activity should trigger the immune system to join in with killing the cancer cells, ensuring the job is done in full.
It has been successful in human bowel cancer cells, using a gene-editing tool to remove the proteins which cause programmed cell death.
The team hope this can be converted into a drug and used to treat many different types of cancer in future.
Explaining the results, one of the scientists involved, Dr Stephen Tait from the Beatson Institute, said: ‘Unfortunately therapies can often fail because they fail to kill cancer cells, and in doing so, the cancer relapses and cancer cells grow back.’
On the new treatment, he added: ‘In effect, you don’t necessarily have to kill all the tumour cells with therapy because we’ve now elicited an immune response that then clears out the remaining tumour – in doing so, eradicating the cancer.’
The new method of killing cancer cells, called Caspase Independent Cell Death (CICD), is outline in the journal Nature Cell Biology.