The Society of Cancer Management
  • Home
    • An After Life
    • News Archive
  • About
    • Terms & Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • Copyright Notice
  • Contact

. . . supporting research that improves cancer survival.

 
Please contact us if you would like to contribute a news item. We are keen to publish more articles from UK-based research and findings that relate to microbial infections during therapy.

Harnessing the power of light to fight cancer

6/2/2016

0 Comments

 
By controlling the actions of immune cells, they could be 'instructed' to kill cancerous tumor cells. Immunotherapy is one of the hottest emerging areas of cancer research. After all, using the body's own cells to fight cancer can be more effective and less invasive than flooding the entire system with toxic chemicals.

Yubin Zhou, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Center for Translational Cancer Research at the Texas A&M Health Science Center Institute of Biosciences & Technology, is studying how to use light to control the immune system and induce it to fight cancer.

"Although neuroscientists have been using light to stimulate neurons for years, this is the first time the technique, called optogenetics, has been used in the immune system," Zhou said. In neuroscience, the process involves genetically engineering cells to produce proteins from light-sensitive microbes and results in nerve cells that will either send--or stop sending--nerve impulses when they are exposed to a particular color of light. "Neuroscientists have learned a lot about brain circuits using the technique," Zhou said, "and now researchers in many other fields are giving it a try."

Zhou and his collaborators have modified the technique for the immune system. It wasn't easy: unlike nerve cells, immune cells don't use tiny electrical impulses to communicate. Additionally, immune cells are located deep in the body and are constantly moving around, so getting the light to them can be difficult.

The development took some ingenuity and cooperation. "We collaborated with Dr. Gang Han at the University of Massachusetts Medical School who does bionanotechnology and photomedicine development," Zhou said. "Together, we were able to combine state-of-the-art optogenetic approaches with cutting edge nanotechnology." Called optogenetic immunomodulation, their method was featured in a recently published article in eLife.

"This work was driven by talented scientists in the lab: graduate students Lian He and Peng Tan and postdoctoral research fellow Guolin Ma, Ph.D.," Zhou said, "who fearlessly undertook this daunting project and overcame all the challenging obstacles to make this technique into reality."

With this method, the researchers can control the action of immune cells and "instruct" them to kill cancerous tumor cells. They use a near-infrared laser beam, which can penetrate deep--in this context, deep means a centimeter or two--into the tissue, where a nanoparticle turns the near-infrared light into blue light, and that directs the activity of genetically engineered immune cells. "
​
" Zhou said.
The team genetically engineered immune cells so that a calcium gate-controlling protein became light sensitive. When they are exposed to the blue light emitted by the nanoparticle, their calcium ion gates open. When the light is turned off, the gates close. More light leads to a greater flow of calcium, so the researchers are able to finely tune the calcium-dependent actions of immune cells to fight against invading pathogens or tumor cells.

When an animal tumor model was injected with both the nanoparticle and the light-sensitive genetically engineered immune cells, the near-infrared laser beam caused calcium channels to open, which boosted an immune response to aid the killing of cancer cells. "The technique reduced tumor size and metastasis, so there are lots of applications," Zhou said.

One advantage of this method is that it only activates a certain type of immune cell, the dendritic cell or T-cell, and only in one part of the body, near the draining lymph nodes or tumor, which helps cut down on the system-wide side effects often seen with chemotherapy. It's also light-tunable, non-invasive and has great temporal resolution--in other words, it can be turned on when it is needed and turned off when it is not.

The implications of the research are far-reaching. "Other scientists will likely use the technique to help them study immune, heart and other types of cells that use calcium to perform their tasks," Zhou said. "It's quite a cool technology. With these tools, we can now not only answer fundamental questions of science that we never could before but also translate it into the clinic for disease intervention."

In parallel, the Zhou lab has been applying this technique to establish a way to screen potential cancer drugs more effectively. "If successful," Zhou said, "all these efforts would remarkably improve the current cancer immunotherapies by personalizing the treatment to exactly where and when it is needed, while reducing side effects."

He et al. Near-infrared photoactivatable control of Ca2+ signaling and optogenetic immunomodulation. eLife 2015;4:e10024 [Article]
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Cancer Therapy & Palliative Care News

    This feed features recent developments in cancer therapy and palliative care. Views in these articles do not necessarily represent those of the Cancer Management Society.

    Archives

    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013

    Categories

    All
    General
    Presentation
    Research
    Review

    RSS Feed

Home

About

Contact Us

Terms & Conditions

Privacy Policy

Copyright Notice

RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly
© The Society of Cancer Management 2017