A pre-clinical research project coordinated by The University of Manchester, which will advance understanding of how cancer cells evade the immune system, has been awarded nearly 12m Euro by the EU.
The European Union Framework Programme (FP6) will enable doctors to improve ‘T-cell mediated immunotherapy’, which has the potential to fight a broad range of cancers.
The five year "ATTACK" Project (Adoptive engineered T-cell Targeting to Activate Cancer Killing), involves an international consortium of 16 partners, who will collaborate on the process of engineering T-cells.
T-cells are part of the body’s immune defense machinery which naturally protects against infections and some cancers and can be used to treat some malignant disease, but many cancers avoid destruction by the immune system. The project team hopes that state of the art technologies can be used to modify the T-cells, to hunt down and destroy cancer tumours.
Robert Hawkins, Cancer Research UK Professor of Medical Oncology at The University of Manchester, said: “Unlike radiotherapy and chemotherapy, which destroy both cancerous and healthy cells, Engineered T-cell Therapy has the potential to selectively destroy cancers within a patient’s body using its own infection-fighting mechanisms. This project focuses on optimising that system in the laboratory.
“The ultimate aim is to develop a process whereby T-cells are taken from the blood of a patient, genetically modified to enable them to target tumours, multiplied in the laboratory and injected in large numbers back into the patient.
The approach stems from original research by Professor Zelig Eshhar in Israel, and the partners include experts in immunology and tumour biology as well as those who have developed key aspects of engineered T-cells. Professor Hawkins continued: