Glioblastoma is a very aggressive type of brain cancer. It spreads fast and can damage healthy parts of the brain.
Right now, treating it is hard because it sends out cancerous parts that are tough to remove through surgery.
A Promising Discovery
Researchers from the Salk Institute have made a hopeful finding. They saw that a treatment called anti-CTLA-4 helped mice with glioblastoma live longer.
The treatment works better when immune cells called CD4+ T cells get into the brain. These cells help another group of immune cells, named microglia, which always stay in the brain, to fight the tumor.
This study, shared in the Immunity journal, suggests that using our body’s defense system might be a powerful way to fight brain cancer.
Professor Susan Kaech said, “Glioblastoma is tough to treat, and right now, there isn’t a good solution. Our findings show that using the body’s immune cells can lead to reducing or even getting rid of the tumor in some cases.”
How Does This New Approach Work?
Doctors are looking more and more at immunotherapy for treating cancer. It’s a way to boost our body’s natural defenses to attack cancer cells.
Susan Kaech wanted to see if the immune system could also help fight brain cancer.
They studied anti-CTLA-4, a drug that helps the immune system be more active against cancer.
There’s another similar drug called anti-PD-1, but it didn’t work well for glioblastoma in other studies. So, the researchers wondered if anti-CTLA-4 would be different.
By looking closer, they found that CD4+ T cells made a protein that signaled the tumor was under stress. This signal then told the microglia to eat the stressed tumor cells.
As they did that, the microglia showed parts of the tumor to the CD4+ T cells, making them more active. This process kept going, helping to destroy the tumor.
Dan Chen, a researcher in the team, said, “This study shows that anti-CTLA-4 and a special process using CD4+ T cells and microglia can work together to fight cancer.”
Building on the Findings
The scientists also worked with Professor Greg Lemke. He has been studying how microglia communicate. They found that certain signals told the microglia to eat the cancer cells.
Siva Karthik Varanasi, another researcher, said they were surprised by how microglia and CD4+ T cells depended on each other to fight the cancer.
“This discovery opens up many new ideas and ways to treat cancers like glioblastoma,” he added.
Susan Kaech said that they could now think of treating glioblastoma by making the brain’s microglia attack tumors. “We’re seeing a new kind of immune response that we didn’t know about before,” she said.
The next step is to see if this same process happens in people with glioblastoma and to study it in different types of disease. The goal is to learn more and find better treatments.
If you care about cancer, please read studies about common drugs for inflammation may help kill cancer, and statin drugs can starve cancer cells to death.
For more information about cancer, please see recent studies about these two things are key to surviving cancer and results showing common Indian fruit may slow down cancer growth.
The study was published in Immunity.
Follow us on Twitter for more articles about this topic.
Copyright © 2023 Knowridge Science Report. All rights reserved.
