A team at Cardiff University is investigating how to train the immune system to destroy breast cancer

Professor Awen Gallimore of Cardiff University and her team are investigating how the immune system can help recognize and destroy breast cancer. Here’s more about her pioneering work she wants to lead to more effective treatment of her illness.

Over the last two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has become more focused on the importance of immunity from disease.But what is the immune system, and how we not only harness its power to fight coronavirusBut also cancer?

The immune system can also protect our body from illnesses, infections, illnesses, and from the development of cancer. However, breast cancer cells have the potential to develop a sneaky way to hide from our immune system. That’s why I’m working to find new ways to help find and destroy cancer cells.

Breast cancer is now funding my lab Cardiff University We are trying to gain a better understanding of the immune system in order to succeed in new treatments for triple-negative breast cancer. This is an aggressive type of breast cancer that is common in women with genetically altered BRCA genes, women under the age of 40, and black women.

read more:“My dad went to the GP five times, but only when he went to A & E, they noticed he had cancer.”

Approximately 2,800 women are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in Wales, of which more than 400 have triple-negative breast cancer. Behind these facts and numbers are daughters, sisters, mothers and friends who face the dreaded reality of limited treatment options. During the first few years after treatment, there is an increased risk that the cancer will relapse and spread to other parts of the body. When breast cancer spreads, it is known as secondary (or metastatic) breast cancer and sadly becomes incurable.

So how can the immune system be used to develop new treatments for this type of breast cancer? White blood cells are part of our immune system. T cells are certain types of white blood cells that recognize unfamiliar substances, bacteria, and even cancer cells. When T cells recognize something abnormal, they provoke an immune response, fighting what can be harmful to the body and maintaining our health.

Drugs that stimulate the immune system to recognize the disease and use the power of the immune system to act on it are called immunotherapy. Because each cancer is different, immunotherapy is more effective against some tumors than others, and has been successfully developed for some cancers, but for people with breast cancer. Has little effect.

Certain cancers, such as skin cancer, may respond better to immunotherapy because the body’s T cells have already invaded the tumor. However, most breast cancers lack T cells, and without T cells, it is difficult for immunotherapeutic agents to enhance a good anticancer immune response.

So the question of a million dollars is how to overcome this. Well, it’s a bit technical here, but stay with me. My team and I are investigating a special type of T cell called a regulatory T cell. Regulatory T cells are of particular interest because their job is to keep the rest of the immune system under control and leave healthy tissue in place. However, regulatory T cells can misunderstand it and instruct the immune system to leave the cancer cells alone.

Efforts to control T cells may be key to developing new cancer immunotherapies. We are investigating this ability of regulatory T cells to turn off the anticancer immune response. Knowing how regulatory T cells do this, our research has the potential to develop improved immunotherapies that can overcome this problem.

Importantly, we hope that this research will lead to the development of new immunotherapies for triple-negative breast cancer. This will be a major step as these patients are in desperate need of new and effective treatments.

Breast Cancer Now is funding world-class research like me in the UK. Through this research, we hope to solve unanswered questions, accelerate progress, and develop new therapies and treatments that give patients hope for the future.

But you can’t do this alone. We rely on the continued support of people across Wales who are generously funding breast cancer now so that charities can continue to fund world-class breast cancer research. increase. Together, we will accelerate progress towards improving the number of cases, deaths and quality of life for people affected by breast cancer.

For more information and donations to breast cancer, please help us continue our world-class research visits. https://breastcancernow.org/research..