Researchers at Uppsala University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed a new form of precision medicine, an antibody, with the potential to treat several types of cancer. Researchers have managed to combine three different functions in the antibody, which together strongly amplify the effect of T cells on the cancer tumour. The study has been published in Nature Communications.
Researchers have developed a unique type of antibody that both targets and delivers a drug package via the antibody itself, while simultaneously activating the immune system ("3-in-1 design") for personalised immunotherapy treatments. "We have been researching precision medicine for close to 15 years now, as well as how we can use antibodies to influence an important key protein (CD40) in the immune system. We can now show that our new antibody method works as precision medicine for cancer," explains Sara Mangsbo, professor at the Department of Pharmacy at Uppsala University, who together with Johan Rockberg, professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, is the study's lead author.
The drug redirects the immune system to find and target specific mutations and gene changes that are only found in cancer cells, known as neoantigens. This is achieved by the new antibody both delivering the unique tumor-specific material directly to a particular type of immune cell and by stimulating this cell simultaneously, which then has the capacity to greatly enhance the T-cell response to the tumor. .