World Cancer Day

With the World Health Organization ranking cancer as the second most common cause of death in the Western world, World Cancer Day, on February 4, marks an opportunity to seek hope in the emerging fields of immunotherapy and personalized medicine. Prof. Cyrille Cohen, who directs the Tumor Immunology and Immunotherapy Laboratory at BIU’s Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, explains how white blood cells, called T-lymphocytes, are harnessed for the "targeted killing" of cancerous cells.

The immune system defends the human body from harmful bacteria, viruses and other infectious agents, but that’s not all: it may also attack cancerous cells produced by the body itself. T-lymphocytes identify their target via molecular “barcodes” found on the surface of the disease-generating cell – and cancer cells are no exception. When a healthy cell becomes malignant due to DNA mutations, its protein composition may change, and these modifications are reflected in different barcodes, which enable T-lymphocytes to recognize them as cancerous cells.

Once we understand the interactions between T-lymphocytes and cancerous cells, we can “engineer” the immune system response to make it more effective. At the macro level, the immune system response seems to be similar for most cancers and patients, but at the micro level, the immune system acts through “personalized” T-lymphocytes and varies from patient to patient. In one of the studies we conducted in our lab, we found that there was not one common mutant protein (product of mutation) for all patients participating in the study.

For example, in one of our recent published studies, we mapped the mutations of a number of skin cancer patients and looked for ones that might serve as a potent target for the immune system. We created probes that can emulate the components of the mutant protein in each cancer and used them to identify the T-lymphocytes that are capable of identifying mutations. This is how we isolated cancer-specific T- lymphocytes from each patient. The process was performed in order to prove the feasibility of customizing the body’s immune defenses for the patient and the tumor.

Our vision is that during the patient’s treatment, it will be possible to isolate T-lymphocytes from a blood sample or directly from the malignant tumor, and then to expand them in the lab and use these to cure the disease. In addition, genetic enhancements can be incorporated into culturally grown T-lymphocytes to strengthen them to resist the suppression induced by the cancer. Since treatment will only target the patient's cancer mutations, we hope that the side effects will be minimal, and not like the difficulties often experienced with chemotherapy."

There’s still a long road ahead, and unfortunately, there is currently no answer for every type of cancer and every patient. In light of the advances made over the past decade in the area of immunotherapy, we trust that we are in the right direction and must continue our efforts on the way to solutions that can help as many people as possible.