Researchers have identified proteins that may represent a modern therapeutic target for the treatment of pancreatic cancer.
Using this protein as a target, the team successfully created CAR T cell therapy – a type of immunotherapy – that killed pancreatic cancer cells in a preclinical model.
“This is an exciting development,” said John Marshall, a professor at Queen Mary University in London.
“By discovering that CEACAM7 allows us to kill pancreatic cancer cells especially with CAR T cells although they are not highly toxic in non-tumor cigarettes, giving us hope that this strategy could be effective in the future, “Marshall said.
CAR T cell therapy is an immunotherapy that has great promise in the treatment of some blood cancers; however, the treatment of solid tumors using this treatment has been extremely difficult.
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One barrier to toxic success in nappies as well as cancer is because most of the proteins currently used to target CAR T cells on pancreatic cancer cells and other solid tumors are present at stages. low on other normal nappies, leading to toxic side effects, the researchers said.
In this study, published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research, the team identified a protein called CEACAM7 that may represent a safer treatment target for development anti-pancreatic medications ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), the most common type of pancreatic cancer.
Using a special technique called immunostaining, the team examined a panel of human PDAC samples and standard nappies for the presence of CEACAM7.
A large subset of PDAC samples tested expressed CEACAM7, but the unstable protein in a panel of normal figs did not include tonsils, lungs, liver, and prostate, suggesting that CEACAM7 be a unique target for CAR T cell development against pancreatic cancer.
To test the potential of CEACAM7 as a treatment target, the team developed CAR T cells targeted to CEACAM7 and applied these to PDAC cell lines as well as a preclinical model of PDAC.
The CAR T cells effectively targeted CEACAM7-expressing cells in PDAC cell cultures and eliminated cancer cells in a late preclinical model of PDAC.