New partnership could result in "one-size-fits-all" cancer treatment

PanARMENIAN.Net - British scientists who announced last week their discovery of a new type of cancer-killing T-cell have entered a partnership with a biotechnology company pioneering the use of Dark Antigens to develop T-cell receptor (TCR)-based immunotherapies and off-the-shelf cancer vaccines. The result—they hope—will be a “one-size-fits-all” cancer therapy, Forbes reports.

Last Monday, scientists at Cardiff University in the UK announced they had identified a new type of killer T-cell—a T-cell clone—that recognized and killed multiple different types of human cancer, while ignoring healthy, non-cancerous cells. The discovery, researchers said, offers hope of a universal cancer therapy. The researchers reported in Nature Immunology that these T-cells attacked many forms of cancer from all individuals. The T-cell clone killed lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer.

Less than a week later, the Cardiff researchers have announced they will enter a partnership with Ervaxx to eventually bring their discovery to patients.

The Cardiff University T-cell modulation group, within the Division of Infection and Immunity, studies all areas of T-cell biology including T-cell genetics, molecular biology, protein chemistry, crystallography and cell biology. The group aims to understand the genetic, biochemical and cellular mechanisms that govern T-cell responses in human diseases, such as HIV, EBV, tuberculosis autoimmunity and cancer.

T-cell therapies for cancer are the latest paradigm in cancer treatments. Current therapies include CAR-T and TCR-T, where immune cells are removed, genetically-modified and returned to a patient’s blood to seek and destroy cancer cells. Current therapies are personalized to each patient, target only a few types of blood cancer and have not been successful for solid tumors, which make up the vast majority of cancers.