An international team of researchers has discovered a new method to fight cancers that no longer respond to treatment.
The team, led by Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, used mutations that make tumours drug-resistant to turn them into a potential therapeutic advantage, Xinhua news agency reported.
One of the biggest challenges in cancer care is when a therapy stops working. In many metastatic cancers, drugs that initially show positive results lose their effectiveness over time as cancer cells mutate and continue to grow.
The new study, published in the journal Cancer Discovery, proposes a novel way to confront cancer resistance by harnessing the very mutations that allow tumours to evade treatment.
The researchers introduced a computational tool called SpotNeoMet, which identifies therapy-resistant mutations common across many patients. These mutations generate tiny protein fragments known as neo-antigens that appear only on cancer cells.
These shared neo-antigens could form the basis for new immunotherapy approaches that prompt the immune system to selectively target cancer cells.
“Our research demonstrates a broad principle that may change the way we think about treatment-resistant cancer,” said Professor Yardena Samuels of the Weizmann Institute.
“The same mutations that allow a tumour to evade a drug can, through precise immunotherapy, become the cancer’s weak point. Unlike ‘boutique’ immunotherapies that must be tailored to individual patients, these therapies could be suitable for large groups of patients,” she added.
The researchers tested their approach on metastatic prostate cancer, a disease in which most patients eventually develop resistance to standard treatments.
They identified three neo-antigens that showed promising results in laboratory experiments and mouse models.
According to the researchers, the approach differs from highly personalised therapies because it targets resistance mutations shared by many patients, allowing the same treatment to be applied more broadly to people with treatment-resistant cancers.
–IANS
