Right now, cancer is usually found when tumors are already grown, which often need vital treatment to remove them and stop them from spreading. A research team at the University of Cambridge will get over £1.5 million from Cancer Research UK in the next six years.
Researchers will study how the immune system changes, targets, and kills cancer cells as tumors form. They hope to find the point when the body starts to notice cancer cells, which could help trigger the immune system to fight cancer before tumors start.
This could greatly reduce the need for heavy treatments, which often have harmful side effects, and help millions of people before cancer becomes serious or spreads.
Dr. Heather Machado leads a team studying how the immune system fights cancer. Her work focuses on T cells, which help fight infections and diseases like cancer, to understand how early they detect and respond to cancer.
The study will examine how T cells react when they first spot a kidney or liver tumor. This research could reveal how our immune cells work to fight cancer. Dr. Machado explains that they can trace T cells’ history using new DNA technology to learn when they first encountered cancer.
“This research could offer a new view on how the immune system affects cancer growth. We hope these findings will help improve life-saving cancer immunotherapies,” she added. She aims to develop new immunotherapy treatments and find ways to detect cancer earlier.
She explained, “Most cancers are found years after they begin, which is often too late. Our methods will let us look back to see how the immune system responds in the early stages of cancer. This could improve treatments and help detect cancer earlier when survival rates are much higher.”
The immune system is our first defense against cancer, but it has been difficult to study this early response in humans.
Dr. Machado will use genome sequencing, which identifies an organism’s genetic makeup, to study how tumors and immune cells change together as the cancer grows.
Thanks to new single-cell genome sequencing technology, she will track T cell growth using evolutionary trees based on the genomes of single T cells. She will also conduct experiments on early-stage kidney and liver cancers and take samples during immunotherapy for advanced kidney cancer.
She explained that this study is likely the first of its kind and could be groundbreaking, as it’s the first time these immune dynamics are being studied in humans. Understanding how long the immune system fights a tumor before a diagnosis is problematic because it happens years earlier.
Dr. Machado, who studied at Stanford and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, said “they are using cutting-edge technology to uncover how the immune system reacts to tumors in unprecedented ways. This could greatly improve immunotherapies and patient outcomes.”