A gel that boosts the immune system can stop cancers from re-growing and spreading in the body. Forty per cent of people with cancer relapse聽within five years of having tumours removed from their body, but results from a study that tested the gel in mice suggest this might be preventable.
The gel re-boots the immune system to purge any cancer cells left after surgery, so they cannot regrow. The strengthened immune system also eliminates cancer cells that have metastasized, or spread to other parts of the body.
Surgery can be performed to remove cancerous tumours, but it also removes immune cells and other substances that help to fight future attacks. After surgery, the immune system also focuses on healing wounds at the tumour site, relaxing its vigilance of any lingering cancerous cells.
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聽of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and his colleagues wondered whether they could boost the immune system聽immediately after surgery to help purge the cancer once and for all. To do so, they created a gel that is placed in the cavity left by a surgically-removed tumour.
The gel slowly releases one of two substances called聽STING-RR or R848 for several months following application. This aids the immune system by activating white blood cells and interferon proteins, both of which help the body defend itself against cancer.
In more than 100 mice implanted with human breast cancer, treatment with the gel effectively cured 65 per cent of the mice by eradicating any metastases that occured after surgery.
Only 10 per cent of control mice who received surgery but not the gel, survived to the end of the three-month experiment.
When the team implanted new tumour cells聽three months post-surgery聽into聽14聽of the surviving mice who had received the gel, they all rejected the new cells, showing that their immune systems were still primed to weed out cancers, whereas聽16 mice who had not received the gel died within 50 days.
The gel also cured mice implanted with skin and lung tumours, suggesting it could work across many cancers. 鈥淲e hope it will be tested in patients in the not too distant future,鈥� says Goldberg.
鈥淭his is excellent work and a step forward in cancer immunotherapy,鈥� says 聽at the Health Research Institute of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, whose team developed a聽鈥渢rapping鈥� strategy聽to prevent metastases. 鈥淚t activates the immune response in the right place and the right moment, and should be [tried out] in those cancers that usually relapse locally, such as cervical cancer,鈥� he says.
