For years, oncologists have been baffled by why checkpoint inhibitors work for some cancer patients and not others. This challenge has made it difficult for these immunotherapies to be widely used since it isn’t easy to predict who will benefit and yet the treatments are currently very expensive.
Now a new study whose findings appeared in the journal Nature has found that autoantibodies, the proteins known to drive autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, could be the missing link that helps checkpoint inhibitors to be more effective against different kinds of cancer and other diseases.
Doctor Aaron Ring, the senior author of this research, explains that their analyses revealed that autoantibodies could significantly increase the chances of immunotherapy succeeding in attempts to shrink tumors. He adds that in some of the cases they looked at, this beneficial effect boosted treatment chances by as much as 5-10 times.
This study could pinpoint the weaknesses of a tumor and provide new pathways that could be leveraged in the fight against cancer.
Doctor Ring points out that for many years, autoantibodies have been regarded as undesirable elements which drive autoimmune diseases. However, the findings of the research indicate that these same proteins can be helpful therapeutic elements in disease management. He revealed that his laboratory at Fred Hutch Cancer Center was now engaged in mapping these previously hidden pharmacology actions in order to uncover ways in which these molecules can be leveraged in disease treatment.
For their study, the team leveraged an assay profiling tool called REAP that Ring developed. They used this tool to screen more than 6,000 different autoantibodies taken from the blood of cancer patients undergoing immunotherapy, as well as healthy individuals.
From their analysis, the team found that patients tended to have higher levels of autoantibodies when compared to samples from healthy individuals. Some of the autoantibodies in patients appeared to be beneficial in making immunotherapy effective. In those cases, the autoantibodies acted like a companion therapy to the checkpoint inhibitors, delivering better clinical outcomes.
However, some autoantibodies identified appeared to play a negative role as they led to worse clinical outcomes for the patients who underwent checkpoint inhibitor therapy.
Doctor Ring says the data they collected on the beneficial and the harmful autoantibodies could open a door for scientists to improve immunotherapy by either boosting the helpful autoantibodies or blocking the harmful ones.
The research team is now expanding their inquiry to cover more cancers with a view to finding ways to make immunotherapy help more patients.
Their promising work could make it possible for parallel teams like those at Calidi Biotherapeutics Inc. (NYSE American: CLDI) to see their immunotherapies under development packing a bigger punch against different kinds of cancer.
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