The clever cells supercharged to seek and destroy cancer
Shauna’s first symptom of bowel cancer in her early 30s was unexplained weight loss at a time she was undergoing IVF. Now, a new discovery may revolutionise treatment.
They are the James Bond of our immune system; spy cells waiting in the wings with a license to kill cancer.
Now an Australian discovery of how to supercharge them is set to change cancer therapy worldwide.
And thanks to an investment of $17m by the Medical Research Future Fund’s Frontier Health and Medical Research initiative, it will be trialled first in Australian patients and manufactured here.
The spy cells are formally known as dendritic cells and their role is to gather intelligence for the immune system to help it seek and destroy disease.
Lead investigator WEHI Professor Stephen Nutt said that infusing a particular type of these cells with chimeric antigen receptors, which have helped revolutionise blood cancer treatment, would upgrade their arsenal and spyware.
“We think these supercharged cells have the potential to revolutionise treatment for bowel cancer and other solid tumours,” he said.
Professor Nutt is working with the project’s chief investigator and WEHI Professor Shalin Naik who has spent his career studying these cells, codenamed DC1s.
“Our DC1s will only be activated when they see cancer,” Professor Naik said.
He believes they could be the missing link in the arsenal of immunotherapies to target solid tumours such as colorectal (bowel), but also breast and lung cancers.
The cells were first discovered in mice more than 35 years ago by now retired WEHI scientist Professor Ken Shortman, but it took two decades to find them in humans.
Now the WEHI team will use the grant in partnership with Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Monash University and the Mater Hospital in Brisbane to test and manufacture them using a patient’s own stem cells, and then trial them in a unique cancer therapy.
Professor Naik said DC1s make up fewer than 1 in 10,000 cells in blood.
“Blink and you will miss them,” he said. “They sort of just sit there waiting for danger. That danger could be an infection. It could be inflammation, it could be cancer, and when it sees it, the cells take a sample and chops up the proteins of that invader and present it to T cells, the soldier cells of the immune system.
“If the T cell recognises the enemy, it replicates to huge numbers and it goes out and kills the offender.”
He said the team will first focus on bowel cancer.
Despite advances in treatments like surgery and chemotherapy, it remains the second-leading cause of cancer death in Australia, the leading cause in young adults aged 25-54.
Shauna Kavanagh and husband Michael are excitedly awaiting the birth of their second daughter any day.
Like big sister Harper, 2, she will be delivered by a surrogate after bowel cancer robbed Ms Kavanagh of the chance to carry a child.
The schoolteacher, now 37, was going through IVF when it was discovered the symptoms she put down to fertility drugs were stage 4 bowel cancer.
“I lost a heap of weight over three or four months; I stopped being able to eat because all the food I ate just hurt my tummy. I kept thinking it was because of the IVF medication,” Ms Kavanagh said.
Once her cancer treatment started, she was no longer able to have children.
Of the potential of the WEHI discovery, Ms Kavanagh said it meant that instead of having invasive chemotherapy and radiation that had been part of her gruelling treatment, this offered a tailored therapy that wouldn’t destroy the entire body.
“For me, in 2019 my full-time job was cancer treatment and not knowing what the side effects were going to be,” she said.
“We had our first wedding anniversary in hospital and for Michael, his most likely outcome was that he was going to be a widow. Now he gets to have a wife and two kids, it’s pretty amazing.”
Ms Kavanagh said she was incredibly grateful to be alive and thankful her cancer treatment had worked.
“But (chemo) destroys everything. I am six years post treatment and I wake up every day with a creaky body and sore joints,” she said.
“Something like this gives you a chance to look at the whole person and ask how it fits into their life and the space to live life in a more happy and fulfilling way.”
Federal Health Minister Mark Butler said in announcing the grant that investing in home-grown research like this means Australians will benefit from treatments developed by our scientists.
“Too many families know the pain of bowel cancer. This project gives real hope for new therapies that could change the story for thousands of Australians,” he said.
Professor Naik said tumours are sneaky and find ways to block spy cells from destroying them.
“Our innovation is that we can make enough of them from a patient’s own stem cells to give back to them in the right place with the right cocktail,” he said.
“We know this works in mice; we know from cancer data analysis that this cell is correlated in patients with the best response to therapy; we believe this is the smoking gun.”
He said until now no one has been able to make them in large numbers to give them back to a patient who doesn’t have enough to help fight a tumour.
Under the terms of the MRFF grant, clinical trials in Australian patients must start within five years.
Professor Naik said if they look promising, there’ll be lots of people knocking on the door from around the world.
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Originally published as The clever cells supercharged to seek and destroy cancer
