E. Shyam P. Reddy: To grow, cancer tumors must hijack the immune system for their needs
E. Shyam P. Reddy, Professor and Director, Cancer Biology Program, Dept OB/GYN at Morehouse School of Medicine, shared on LinkedIn:
“To grow, cancer tumors must hijack the immune system for their needs.
One of the main tricks that most tumors use is to manipulate a type of immune cell called a macrophage, causing it to protect the tumor from the rest of the immune system, recruit blood vessels and help the cancer spread to other tissues.
Now researchers in Professor Ido Amit’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science have used state-of-the-art gene editing and single-cell and AI technologies to identify a master switch that turns macrophages into cancer helpers.
Based on this discovery, the team developed a new therapy that was shown to be effective in mice with bladder tumors, one of the most common types of cancer in humans and one for which only limited therapeutic innovations are currently available. The discovery is presented in a paper published in the journal Cancer Cell.
‘Macrophages are highly versatile cells, sort of a ‘Swiss knife’ of the immune system, capable of activating multiple types of functions for different tasks and in different situations,’ explains Amit, a faculty member of Weizmann’s Systems Immunology Department.
These cells have the potential to be highly effective cancer eradicators that can perform multiple antitumor functions, such as promoting anticancer inflammation or alerting the rest of the immune system to the dangers posed by tumor cells. That’s precisely the reason most solid cancers need to convert macrophages to their side in order to develop.
‘By doing that, the tumors protect themselves from the macrophages’ ‘nasty’ side, and also turn on macrophage functions that help them grow, such as suppressing the activity of other immune cell types and encouraging blood vessel growth for supplying oxygen to the tumor.”
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