"Unlike blood cancers, solid tumours are hard to treat using CAR T cells because the tumours are dense, difficult to access and lack a common antigen target on every cell. At least, that's been the story until now. A paradigm-shifting study published in Science today, overturns this theory by demonstrating that at least one antigen, CD70, is expressed on 100% of cancer cells in some solid tumours."
"It was a hunch that led Hanina to double-check whether seemingly CD70-free cancer cells expressed residual amounts of the protein. She found that kidney tumours that were genetically engineered to lack CD70 seemed dark when using an optical imaging technique known as confocal microscopy. But tumours that were negative for CD70 on every other conventional test displayed a faint signal for the protein when using this imaging technique."
"It's a jump, says Sophie Hanina, an immunologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City who spearheaded the research. It's targeting the unseen. Those kinds of jumps can only happen when they are guided by intuition, Hanina says."
Researchers engineered immune cells to detect extremely low levels of CD70 antigen, successfully eliminating kidney, ovarian, and pancreatic tumors in mice. Solid tumors have been difficult to treat with conventional CAR-T immunotherapies because they are dense, hard to access, and lack consistent antigen targets. The breakthrough discovery reveals that CD70 is expressed on 100% of cancer cells in some solid tumors, though often at levels too low for conventional detection methods. Using advanced confocal microscopy imaging, researchers identified faint CD70 signals in tumors that tested negative through standard tests. This finding suggests cancer cells silence antigen expression as an escape mechanism. The research team plans to pursue funding for human phase I safety trials.
Read at Nature
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