Fighting Cancer with Immunotherapy: What is it and how does it work?

We have a remarkable immune system, capable of detecting rogue cells and foreign invaders, destroying them on impact.  Tumor cells, however, have developed ways to not only evade the immune response, but also to co-opt it for its own advantage (Hallmarks of Cancer).  With a deeper understanding of these processes, cancer immunotherapy is one of the newest tricks in our cancer treatment bag.  It is also a major topic at conferences both in Canada (Conferences) and globally.  Immunotherapy even pops up in the mainstream news and on social media frequently.  Whether you’re a patient currently treated using immunotherapy or are just curious about the latest cancer research news, you’ve come to the right place! This article is a stepping-stone to a better understanding of cancer immunotherapy. 

More than 100 years ago, William B Coley, the father of immunotherapy and a New York surgeon, injected bacteria into a patient with cancer.  Such an experiment was the first to suggest that a bacterial injection could mount an inflammatory response, bringing immune cells in contact with the tumor and subsequently killing these tumor cells.  100 years ago, this practice was rudimentary and not necessarily advantageous to the patient.  Now, with our advanced knowledge of the immune system and tumor biology, we can offer several immunological approaches to kill cancer cells.  

Immunotherapy can refer to any one of several different types of therapies that use different aspects of immunology.  There are four main categories:

Top Canadian Research Stories of 2015: Teaching an old dog new tricks

Every day cancer scientists around the globe make progress in our understanding of the basis of cancer, how to prevent the disease, and how to treat the disease.  Canada plays an important part in this progress. 

The Canadian Cancer Society recently released its top Canadian Cancer Society funded research stories of 2015.  The projects range from new tools to study cancer, new understanding of biological basis disease to new tools to diagnose and treat cancer to quality of life issues for cancer patients. Check out all their stories here!

All of the 10 stories are amazing and intriguing.  But today I will highlight one from our own backyard at the NCIC Cancer Clinical Trials Group in Kingston, Ontario.

As a scientist, I think of cancer research in terms of novel treatments and improving patient survival.  But there’s another area of cancer research that physicians and cancer patients care a lot about: cancer pain.  As a patient, having to undergo radical therapy and alter your lifestyle is hard enough.  Understanding pain associated with cancer and managing symptoms is just as an essential component of cancer research.

Canadian Cancer Research Conference 2015

Several weeks ago now, close to 1000 cancer researchers – scientists, clinicians, mathematicians, investors, and public health officials – from across Canada came together at the Canadian Cancer Research Conference (link) in Montreal, QC, to discuss our insights, successes, questions, and our hopes for cancer research.  Although the disciplines are diverse, we share one common goal: to better prevent, detect, and treat cancer.

This is the third time such a conference has been held in Canada and the second time that I have attended.  Because of the breadth of disciplines attending the event, the wealth of information and the topics are varied and very rarely lend to boredom. 

Although the science can be detailed, and the big ideas mind-bending, there were several moments that struck me in their importance.  For brevity, I will just list them and let you ponder them.  Hopefully, over the next several months, we can delve deeper into these ideas.

Bra-wearing and Breast Cancer Risk: When research supports me.

If you follow enough media news, you might become overly discouraged: everything causes cancer.  The food you eat, the air your breathe, the environment you live in, the clothes you wear.  Everything.  Although some of these claims may be grounded in science, the media has a tendency to extend the truth.  For example, awhile back I read an Internet posting about how wearing bras may cause breast cancer.  I shook my head is disbelief and continued wearing a bra.  And then recently, I came across this journal article, Bra wearing not associated with breast cancer risk”, refuting the claim.  I was intrigued and slightly amused.

New trick for an old hat: Extranuclear Cyclin D1

Research that blows our mind.

In one of the most highly cited papers from July 2014, researchers from the departments of Cancer Biology and the Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia describe a new function in a new location with a novel interaction for the cell cycle protein cyclin D1.  

Such a discovery can shake your world just a little bit.  It’s like seeing your supervisor, the highly intelligent yet quiet and reserved enigma of a man, at your favourite coffee shop.  Wait, my boss leaves his office?  And he works here too, just like me?  Your mind is blown and getting coffee there is never the same.

And so it is with cyclin D1. 

Shifting our mindset back to the basics.

As this is a forum for learning and discovery, I wanted to stay away from any form of writing that might come across as a rant.  But perhaps you will permit me, this one time, to go off on a slight tangent.  Some of this article has appeared in Queen’s Health Science Journal, volume 13, 2013.

I was inspired but a recent editorial by Bob MacDonald, a well-known, well-liked Canadian science journalist who works for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation.  In his editorial (check it out here), he argues for increased funding for the basic sciences.  The trend across many countries involves funneling research dollars away from basic research to those projects most likely to have direct impact on its citizens and/or on economic growth.  Quite frankly, this trend is short-sited.  As MacDonald writes, “To focus only on applied sciences is to limit future possibilities”¹. 

Cancer Avatars for Personalized Medicine

They’re not blue and they’re not science fiction.  They are avatars, at least of the cancer kind.  From the hands of Dr. Sandeep Pingle, MD PhD from Moore’s Cancer Center in UC San Diego, CA comes computer representations of tumor cells.  Defined as an icon or figure representing a person, avatar is an appropriate term to describe the computer simulation modeling the genomic signatures of individual cancers and how they will respond to specific therapeutic interventions. 

In light of the recent discussions on how each tumor is unique and the need for personalized medicine, this newest discovery provides a tool for a comprehensive analysis of individual cancers.  Most importantly, it can be customized for each patient, allowing clinicians to treat patients selectively with drugs believed to have the greatest chance of success.