Find out how to make blood cancer cells kill each other

Leukemia or cancer affects the bone marrow and blood, famous for being difficult to treat and relapse. However, a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has brought hope to leukemia patients after revealing that we can induce self-induced blood cancer cells. kill each other.

More precisely, experts from Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in the United States have found a technique to lure blood cancer cells into leukemia immune cells, rewriting their biological programming program. The key to this technique is an extremely rare antibody in humans.

Antibodies are naturally produced proteins by the immune system of a person. They act as " police handcuffs" of white blood cells, sticking to foreign intruders like germs and directly disabling them or marking them so that the immune system attacks them. .

Recently, scientists are trying to find antibody therapies to treat people with immune cell defects, in which the bone marrow does not produce enough white blood cells. They hope to find antibodies that will activate receptors on immature bone marrow cells, causing them to transform into mature cells.

Found a way for cancer cells to kill each other.

In the past few years, scientists have succeeded in this effort. However, what they do not expect to see is that a handful of these growth-promoting antibodies turn into immature bone marrow cells into completely different forms, such as the often found cells. seen in the nervous system.

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a form of leukemia that is particularly "aggressive" that attacks spinal cells, which are responsible for dealing with infections, parasites and preventing spread. Transmission of tissue damage, in the body. AML patients produce too many white blood cells in the bone marrow, disturbing the normal production of other blood cells.

The researchers flooded growth-promoting antibodies into a dangerous AML cell blood sample. As a result, antibodies have turned AML cells into tree-shaped cells, which play a key supporting role within our immune system. When exposed longer to antibodies, these cells have become more mature into cells that possess the appearance and function similar to those that hunt and destroy threats in the body, including viruses, bacteria and cancer cells.

These "natural killer" (NK) cells show the ability to kill up to 15% of "brotherly" blood cancer cells in a specimen within 1 day. Surprisingly, NK cells seem to only stick and attack themselves as AML cells, not other types of cancer cells.

This research and hope team called "brotherhood therapy" can be used to transform a variety of different types of cancer cells into certain NK cells, to actually cure Get rid of cancer patients.