Proteins Showing Promising Results towards Increasing the Effectiveness of the Immunotherapy Drugs

Release Date: 04-Aug-2020

A certain protein is found to be boosting the effectiveness of the available immunotherapy drugs for the cancer patients. This is detected by a group of researchers at the Washington University. For past few years, immunotherapy has been one of the most promising therapies for the cancer treatment as it involves the cells the mechanism of action that the cancer cells tries escaping from for their survival. In order to overcome all the challenges in the immunotherapy, researchers came acorss with a protein called as TREM2 which is estimated to play a key role in the immune system suppression.

It was suggested through the study that the protein could be used as a potential target to improve the overall outcomes related with immunotherapy. Testing of the hypothesis was done on a mouse having sarcoma. One group of administered with the checkpoint inhibitors, another with antibody that can block TREM2, one group received both together and the last group was administered with placebo. It was found that the cancer cells in the control group grew steadily but the group that received both the treatment showed complete tumor suppression. For sarcoma and colorectal cancer similar results were found (as mentioned above)

The use of TREM2 protein as a target is associated with two different advanatges. First is that is only expressed in the tumor cells that means the targeting of the protein is very selective and will not harm the healthy neighboring cells. Second, the protein is found to be present in several different types of cancer, therefore making it a broad spectrum antibody. Through all the studies it was found that the protein is a potential booster for the immunotherapy drugs.