Women and Children Not Responding to Cancer Immunotherapy, Research Says

Cancer immunotherapy refers to a series of procedures that strengthen the patient’s own immune system against cancer cells. Unfortunately, other patients do not respond either.

A research team at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine investigated why young or female patients respond poorly to certain types of cancer immunotherapy. Their research results are published in the latest journal Natural communication..

(Photo: Dan Kitwood / Getty Images / Cancer Research UK)
Cambridge, UK-December 9: Scientist examining cells in 96-well plates. Using these plates, scientists observed a large number of cells at the same time at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, December 9, 2014, in Cambridge, UK, showing that drug-treated and untreated cells were Can be compared directly.

Immunity, sex, age

In their report, UCSD researchers found evidence pointing to a generally strong immune system found in young female patients. These are generally better at fighting tumor cells. However, the cells that are left behind are not “visible to the immune system”, so the cells stop responding. Cancer immunotherapy..

“Once we know why some patients are also unresponsive to immunotherapy, we can start developing an informed approach to treatment decisions,” said Dr Hannah Carter, Associate Professor of Medicine at UCSD School of Medicine. States. She cited the development of a predictive algorithm to determine an individual’s response before starting immunotherapy.

When cancer cells develop, the infected cells generate a “molecular flag” that informs the immune system. This causes the immune system to clear them out at an early stage. This molecular flag, supported by the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), commonly appears on the surface of cells in the body.

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These individual MHC genotypes may be associated with mutational status in the first stages of tumorigenesis, or cancer cell.. In addition, the MHC project’s antigenic flags (information about infected cells) allow the immune system to detect them.

The generated tumor cells are those that produce flags that are visible to the immune system’s investigative system and have various mutations that should make them easier to detect.

However, some tumor cells can circumvent this detection process by raising the value corresponding to a stop signal that prevents the immune system from distinguishing cells by the MHC flag. At this point, immune checkpoint inhibitors are used. Cancer immunotherapy uses antibodies to flag tumor cells and make them again detectable to the immune system.

Difficulties of young and female patients with immune checkpoint inhibitors

The lack of responsiveness among young and female patients has been observed and investigated in previous studies. One of the most common observations is that female patients 2x antibody response To flue-like vaccines, and they tend to get autoimmune status.

The human immune system, like other physiological organ systems, weakens with age. This paper also deals with the seemingly counterintuitive inverse relationship between age and gender with autoimmune reactions. In this case, a stronger immune response works against these people for cancer.

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The UCSD team used data from The National Cancer Institute’s The Cancer Genome Atlas to analyze the genomic information of approximately 10,000 patients. They also looked at 342 patients with other tumor types using data from the International Cancer Genome Consortium database. They were unable to establish an association between age or sex and MHC function.

However, they were able to observe that young and female patients were prone to accumulate cancer-related mutations for which MHC could not efficiently show the immune system. “Thus, if tumor cells don’t present highly visible, mutated self-antigens in the first place, checkpoint inhibitors don’t help reveal them to the immune system,” Carter suggested.

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