New Discovery in Brain Cancer Patients To Fight Tumors

Immunotherapies modulating the formation of tertiary lymphoid structures in the brain offer exciting opportunities to find new ways of regulating the anti-tumor immune response in brain tumor.

The lymph node-like structures discovered close to the tumor in brain cancer patients activate the immune cells to attack the tumor.

Researchers at Uppsala University also reported that immunotherapy enhanced the formation of these structures in a mouse model. This discovery suggests new opportunities to regulate the anti-tumor response of the immune system.

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‘The lymph node-like structures discovered in brain cancer patients can help to fight tumors.’

The reason behind a poor treatment outcome in brain tumor is immune system designed to detect and destroy foreign cells including cancer cells, cannot easily reach the tumor site due to the barriers that surround the brain.

To fight a developing tumor, killer immune cells such as T lymphocytes must be activated and primed in our lymph nodes must travel to the tumor site to effectively kill the cancer cells.

The new study published in the journal Nature Communications,the researchers described about the discovery of structures similar to lymph nodes in the brain where T lymphocytes can be activated.

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"It was extremely exciting to discover for the first time the presence of lymph node-like structures in glioma patients. They have all the components needed to support lymphocyte activation on-site which means that they could have a positive effect on the anti-tumour immune response," says Alessandra Vaccaro, PhD student at the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology and shared first author of the study.

They also showed that the formation of TLS (Tertiary lymphoid structures) in the brain can be induced by a type of immunotherapy in glioma-bearing mice.

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When they treated the mice with immunostimulatory antibodies called αCD40, the formation of TLS was enhanced and always occurred in proximity to tumors. αCD40 is currently being tested to treat brain tumours in a number of clinical trials.

In this study the researchers found that while αCD40 boosted TLS formation, it also counterproductively inhibited the tumor-killing ability of the T lymphocytes. Therefore, it provided important insights into the multifaceted effects of αCD40 therapy.

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Source-Medindia