Can we stop cancers hiding from immunotherapy?
Cancer types:
Lung cancer
Project period:
–
Research institute:
University of Navarra
Award amount:
£199,626
Location:
Spain
Dr Alfonso Calvo and his team in Spain are hoping to find a way for immunotherapies to work better, for more cancer patients. Using cutting-edge technologies they will test out a potential new way to treat cancer and explore how to advance it towards the clinic.
Hope for the future
Immunotherapy is a promising way to treat cancer by helping our own immune system attack cancer cells. It doesn’t always work on all patients though so Dr Alfonso Calvo and his team are hoping to find a way to improve immunotherapy, allowing more patients to have success with this treatment.
They also hope to discover new ways to measure how well immunotherapy is working, something which has been a challenge up to now. This would help predict which tumours could become resistant to existing immunotherapy treatments and these patients could be given different, better therapies.
Meet the scientist
Alfonso is a biologist who has always been curious about nature and how the human body works. He particularly enjoy getting students excited about medical breakthroughs and the science and effort behind them.
In addition, he is passionate about sports and enjoys spending time with others. He believes that living a healthy lifestyle and socializing with friends and family makes you happier while also helping to prevent future diseases.
The science
Our immune system is sometimes able to recognise specific proteins or ‘antigens’ on cancer cells that act as flags, signalling to our immune cells to destroy the cancer. Other times though, cancer can hide from our immune system.
One way cancer cells can hide from the immune system is to turn off the machinery that presents the antigen flags. Research has shown that this is often the case in patients that have stopped responding to immunotherapy. Dr Alfonso Calvo had a bright idea about how to make these tumours be seen by the immune system again – by injecting a drug combination that mimics a virus infection. Our immune system is primed to respond to viruses so this would act like a new, improved flag, and would trigger an immune response.
Preliminary results suggest that not only can this method make tumours disappear, it can also provide protection against future cancer development. Thanks to support from Curestarters, this project will investigate Dr Calvo’s idea further and look at how to translate it to the clinic. If successful, this exciting research could pave the way towards new cures for several cancer types including lung cancer and bowel cancer.
This grant is very special to me, particularly because Curestarters are behind the funding. It is a great responsibility, and I will do my best to successfully carry out the project. Often, research discoveries do not have immediate applications, but I am confident that our project will have a future impact in establishing more effective treatments.
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