New Combo Protocol Of Adoptive Cell Therapy With Bempegaldesleukin To Treat Advanced Melanoma
Source: Thailand Medical News Jan 31, 2020 4 years, 9 months, 2 weeks, 6 days, 21 hours, 10 minutes ago
A new research study by
oncology researchers at the University Of California Los Angeles Jonsson Comprehensive
Cancer Center suggests that using an
immunotherapy drug called NKTR-214, also known as
bempegaldesleukin, in combination with an infusion of
anti-tumor immune cells, or T cells, may produce a stronger immune response that could help fight advanced
melanoma.
The researchers told
Thailand Medical News that the new combo protocol when tested in mice with
melanoma tumors that were unlikely to stimulate an immune response, significantly demonstrated an increased number of
anti-tumor immune cells, and those immune cells lived longer and functioned better than the standard therapy, empowering the cells to destroy the tumor.
Typically,
adoptive cell therapy is a type of
immunotherapy that has had promising results for treating people with advanced
cancers. The approach involves extracting and harvesting immune cells from a patient and engineering them in the laboratory to attack specific antigens on the surface of tumors.
However, one challenge is that it requires giving patients interleukin 2, a protein signaling molecule in the immune system, to promote the development and expansion of the infused immune cells. But interleukin 2 can also activate cells to suppress the immune system, and because it is highly toxic, it can have serious adverse side effects.
Medical researchers have been seeking ways to produce large number of immune cells without exposing patients to those negative side effects, including by combining
adoptive cell therapy with other treatments.
The
oncology researchers used mice to test NKTR-214
or bempegaldesleukin in combination with
adoptive cell therapy. Using bioluminescence imaging, the researchers tracked the movement of T cells in the mice that received the combination therapy. The team observed an expansion of T cells in the spleen, the organ that helps accelerate the activation and expansion of T cells throughout the body. The T cells then migrated to the tumor, where they continued to have a long-lasting effect. The in vivo expansion and T cell accumulation in tumors was greatly improved when using NKTR-214 compared to using interleukin-2.
While
immunotherapy has changed the face of
cancer treatment for people with advanced
cancers, it still only works in a small subset of patients. The results of the UCLA study suggest that using NKTR-214
or bempegaldesleukin in combination with
adoptive cell therapy could be effective for more people with advanced solid tumors.
Reference
: &l
t;em>Nature Communications (2020).
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-14471-1
