Genetics of cancer tumours reveal possible treatment revolution

Breakthrough could allow potent personalised treatments which prime patients’ own immune systems to attack biological markers on tumours

How immune cells could tackle tumours.

Ian Sample Science editor-Thursday 3 March 2016

A landmark discovery into the genetic makeup of tumours has the potential to open a new front in the war on cancer, delivering potent therapies that are tailored to individual patients, scientists have said.

The breakthrough comes from research into the genetic complexity of lung and skin cancers which found that even as tumours grow and spread around the body, they carry with them a number of biological “flags” that the immune system can be primed to attack.

Because the flags, which appear as surface proteins, are found only on cancer cells, they provide what scientists described as “exquisite targets” for new therapies that draw on the power of the immune system to combat cancer.

Treatments that harness the immune system have shown great promise against some forms of cancer, such as melanoma, but they do not work in everyone.

One approach releases the brakes on the immune system, unleashing the full force of killer T cells, which are otherwise dampened down by cancer cells. But to work, the patient’s immune system must first recognise the cancer as the enemy.

Charles Swanton, an expert on cancer evolution who led the latest study at the Francis Crick Institute in London, said the discovery of surface proteins shared by all of a patient’s cancer cells provided an “achilles heel” for future therapies to target.

 How immune cell treatment works

The international team, involving scientists from Harvard, MIT and University College London, found that the patients in their study had already launched immune reactions against their cancers. But the attacks were too feeble to destroy the malignant cells. Close inspection of the tumours revealed immune cells buried inside them: some had recognised the cancer’s unique flags, but were either outnumbered or defeated by the cancer’s defences.

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