Researchers at City of Hope have discovered a type of immune cell in the human body that can successfully destroy cancer.
The cells — called human type 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) — are known to be important for allergy and other immune responses.
What City of Hope’s research revealed is that the cells can also overpower a tumor’s defenses and eliminate malignant cells in mouse models with cancer.
“The City of Hope team has identified human ILC2 cells as a new member of the cell family capable of directly killing all types of cancers, including blood cancers and solid tumors,” said Jianhua Yu, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation at City of Hope and the study’s senior author. “In the future, these cells could be manufactured, preserved by freezing, and then administered to patients.”
Importantly, patients may be able to get the ILC2s from healthy donors instead of from their own cells. This could lead to an “off-the-shelf” therapy that gets to patients quicker, which can be crucial in cancer treatment. Therapies sourced from patients’ own cells generally take longer to process before treatment can begin.
Previous research of ILC2s mostly centered on mouse cells. But the City of Hope researchers focused on human cells and found important differences. “It was a real surprise in the field to find that human ILC2s function as direct cancer killers while their mouse counterparts do not,” said Michael Caligiuri, M.D., who is a co-senior author of the study and a City of Hope professor in the Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation.
The findings are among numerous research-driven breakthroughs being made at City of Hope, one of the largest cancer research and treatment organizations in the United States. City of Hope teams are advancing a new form of “liquid biopsy” for early cancer detection, investigating novel blood-cancer immunotherapies, developing personalized cancer-fighting vaccines, and much more.
ILC2s might be able to help fight other diseases as well. “We aim to really expand the applications of these findings, potentially beyond cancer treatments,” Yu said, noting that ILC2s may even work against viruses such as COVID-19.
City of Hope has already jumped at least one hurdle in getting ILC2s to clinical trials — having enough of the product to test. ILC2s are rare in the body, but the team has an innovative method to grow them quickly.
“You have to be able to expand these cells for human clinical trials and one of the exciting things is that we are on the right track,” Caligiuri said.
The City of Hope team’s preclinical research was recently published online in Cell, one of the world’s premier scientific journals.
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