Study finds hope for ovarian cancer patients in new immunotherapy

CAR T-cell therapy, a certain kind of cancer treatment in which the immune system's T cells are programmed to attack tumour cells, is effective in mice with ovarian cancer, according to a study published in The Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer. The researchers hope that the discovery will pave the way for a clinical trial to see how effective the treatment is for women with the disease.

CAR T-cell therapy is a relatively new type of immunotherapy that involves extracting a patient’s immune cells (known as T cells) from the blood and injecting them in a laboratory with a new gene that specifically attacks a molecule called a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) on the surface of the tumour cells. When returned to the patients, the T cells are more aggressive, and attack the cancer cells like guided missiles.

Many ovarian tumours contain mesothelin, and the researchers wanted to test three types of CAR molecule programmed to attack this particular protein. They therefore repeatedly exposed ovarian cancer cells to the programmed CAR T-cells in test tubes and conducted several experiments on mice.

All three CAR T-cells significantly prolonged the lives of the mice with cancer compared to those in the control group, with the type called M1xx CAR T cells proving the most efficacious. The mice that were injected with T cells that express that particular molecule saw a reduction in tumour size and lived even longer than the others. Several of the mice were even cured.

Reference:

“Tuned activation of MSLN-CAR T cells induces superior anti-tumor responses in ovarian cancer models”, Esther Schoutrop, Thomas Poiret, Ibrahim El Serafi, Ying Zhao, Rui He, Alina Moter, Johan Henriksson, Moustapha Hassan, Isabelle Magalhaes, Jonas Mattsson, The Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, online 6 February 2023, doi: 10.1136/jitc-2022-005691.