Can studying the earliest stages of lung cancer lead to better treatments?
Cancer types:
Lung cancer
Project period:
–
Research institute:
International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB)
Award amount:
£157,500
Location:
Italy
Dr Benvenuti and her team are going right back to the beginning and studying exactly how cells interact during the very first critical stages of lung cancer growth. They hope to better understand how cancer cells communicate with other cells around them, and find new clues towards improved treatments for patients with lung cancer.
Why is this research needed?
Lung cancer is the most common cancer worldwide, and the biggest cause of cancer death. We urgently need to know more about how this cancer grows, so we can develop better treatment options and prevent more lives from being cut short.
In this project, Dr Benvenuti and her team will study in detail exactly how cancer cells communicate with other types of cells around them as they grow. They are especially interested in how white blood cells interact with cancer at the very start, as these cells can influence how easily cancer cells survive in our body. The team hope their findings will ultimately lead to huge improvements in how we can treat lung cancer, and help to make sure that more people with the disease live longer.
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What is the science behind this project?
Macrophage immune cells are a type of white blood cell that can kill and engulf cancer cells. But confusingly, they can also sometimes do the opposite, and help cancer cells to grow and survive. Finding out how macrophages interact with cancer cells in the earliest stages of growth could help us understand what makes macrophages behave like this, and give us clues on how to improve cancer treatments.
Until now it is has been technically very difficult for researchers to study how these different cells interact as cancer develops. Dr Benvenuti and her team have developed an exciting new technique that will let them study in slow motion detail exactly how macrophages interact with lung cancer tumours.
The team aim to grow mini-lung cancer tumours, called organoids, under very controlled conditions that mimic how cancer starts. This will enable them to pin down how cancer cells and macrophages communicate, right from the very beginning. These experiments will also help them to understand whether manipulating the way that these two types of cells communicate could improve treatments like immunotherapies, which work by harnessing the power of our immune system to attack cancer.
What difference could this project make to patients in the future?
Not only will this important work help to unravel how cancer cells and macrophages talk to each other, but it will also establish a brand-new research method that can push forward lung cancer research.
This unique method will give researchers the ability to reproduce lung tumour growth in the lab in a way that has never been done before. It will also give us brilliant new insights showing how we can develop new and better cures for patients.
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