Immune cells can hunt down cancer cells - even those hidden away

We tend to think of cancer as lumps in soft places, but bones can also grow tumours.

Sometimes these are visible, but sometimes the only symptom is pain. Because young people are growing and doing more exercise, this can often be dismissed as growing pains or as a sports injury.

Unfortunately, that means that it can be diagnosed quite late, which makes it very difficult to treat. Treatments like chemotherapy and amputation sometimes are not enough - but there are currently few successful alternatives.

Funded by The Little Princess Trust, Dr Jonathan Fisher is working on a new type of immunotherapy for osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer.

He is engineering special immune cells that can hunt down cancer cells, even those hidden away inside the bone.

Unlike other immunotherapies, Jonathan’s treatment uses gamma-delta T-cells. These cells are found in more places, so are better at getting into the bones, and don’t need to come from the patient.

This means that the treatment could be prepared in batches, rather than needing to be specially made to order like those used in CAR-T therapy.

So far, Jonathan has made the cells able to ‘sniff out’ chemicals released by cancer cells and follow them to their source – the tumour.

This means the treatment is able to hunt down cancer cells, rather than hoping to bump into them.

The next step was to make sure the gamma-delta T-cells survived in the body long enough to get to the tumour and kill it.

Unfortunately, the lab-grown cells needed a special supplement to survive which wasn’t available in the body. Jonathan managed to engineer the gamma-delta T-cells to produce the supplement themselves.

Jonathan’s approach to killing cancer cells is two-fold. Firstly, the supplement he made the gamma-delta T-cells produce naturally attracts other immune cells and recruits them to fight against the cancer.

The normal gamma-delta T-cells found in our bodies can only kill cells that are covered in antibodies – tiny proteins made by other cells that recognise and attach to unwelcome things in the body, like cancer cells or bacteria.

To ensure Jonathan’s treatment can kill osteosarcoma cells, he engineered the T-cells to produce their own antibodies.

Jonathan now has a self-supporting cancer-killing immunotherapy, which has shown very promising results in the lab.

Almost at the end of his Little Princess Trust-funded project, Jonathan hopes to receive funding to further develop his treatment.

Find out more about this project here.