Immunotherapy has emerged as a more gentle way to treat cancer over the past few years. However, it is very expensive and results are usually inconsistent among patients, especially those suffering from solid tumors. Researchers in Hong Kong have come up with a biomaterial containing silica that can help to address the current shortcomings of immunotherapy and dramatically improve efficacy rates.
Prof. Yung Kin-lam, who led the team of researchers, explains that the nanomaterial they developed is biocompatible, non-toxic, natural and comes in the shape of a nanomatrix. This biomaterial accelerates the maturation of dendritic cells (DCs) outside the body of the patient and these are infused into the patient to wake up the body’s ability to identify, attack and kill cancer cells. These ‘nanozigzag’ particles also prime the immune system to such an extent that tumor cells can no longer ‘camouflage’ themselves and evade being attacked.
Preclinical tests of this innovative biomaterial revealed in the study have shown that they are effective at inhibiting the growth of tumors, prolonging the memory of the immune system in identifying malignant cells, and prolonging the duration within which the immune system has a boosted ability to respond to and attack tumors.
Another key feature of this innovative treatment is that since it is made outside the patient’s body, it can work even for patients whose immunity has been suppressed or compromised by other treatments like chemotherapy. The production process is standardized and scalable, which gives it the added benefit of cost-reduction and expedited production cycles.
This approach opens the door to the future production of DC vaccines with a more universal applicability. The team plans to test how their approach can be used in treating other immune-system-linked conditions like multiple sclerosis and systemic lupus. Their success in treating these other conditions would prove that the approach has an even wider scope of diseases where it can be applied.
For now, the team is focused on working with other medical facilities in Mainland China and Hong Kong to optimize the protocols they use to develop the cell cultures, conduct further evaluation of the efficacy of the therapy, and lay the foundation for the treatment to be taken through clinical trials before it is eventually available to patients once it passes all the steps required to obtain regulatory approval.
There is plenty of hope in the future of immunotherapy because so many companies like Calidi Biotherapeutics Inc. (NYSE American: CLDI) and university-based research teams are exploring different avenues through which immunotherapy can not only become effective for all cancer patients but can also be produced cost-effectively to make the therapy affordable for as many patients as possible.
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