Animal experiments by multinational research teams have improved the tumor control rate from 40% to nearly 100%. The animal experiments carried out by three research teams, namely, the University of Chicago, Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese mainland, and Tsinghua University, Beijing, have jointly found a feasible breakthrough scheme to solve this problem, and greatly improved the tumor control rate of immunotherapy from 40% to nearly 100%, with an increase of 1.5. This research paper was published in the February issue of Nature.
What is the tumor control rate? Before explaining the breakthrough of this research, Hehojun will explain to you what is the "tumor control rate". Generally speaking, the curative effect of cancer patients can be divided into four levels: complete remission (CR), partial remission (PR), disease stability (SD) (tumor no longer grows) and disease progression. The so-called disease control rate is equal to "complete remission" plus "partial remission" plus "stable condition". The disease control rate is 65,438+0,000%, which means that almost all patients who have received treatment will not continue to grow, and even some patients will shrink.
The disease control rate reached 100% after the removal of YTHDF 1 protein gene and the combination of anti-PD-L 1 therapy. In this animal experiment, research teams in the United States and Chinese mainland modified the gene mRNA in mouse dendritic cells, removed YTHDF 1 protein from dendritic cells, and inoculated mice with melanoma and colon cancer cells.
The experimental results showed that compared with the mice in the control group who only used anti-PD-L 1 or only removed protein YTHDF 1, the disease control rate of mice after removing gene YTHDF 1 combined with anti-PD-L 1 was almost 100%. He Chuan, a professor at the University of Chicago, a multinational research team, said that when YTHDF 1 was eliminated and combined with PD-L 1 antibody, almost all mice's tumors were controlled.
Antigen presenting cells (APC) are a good helper to help T cells kill cancer cells. When APC finds cancer cells, it can process the antigen against cancer cells, and then give it to T cells to get the information of cancer cells, and then T cells activated by APC can correctly find cancer cells and kill them. Dendritic cells are monocytes with the strongest anticancer ability among antigen presenting cells (APC).
However, the research team found that the abnormal m6A gene in dendritic cells can bind to YTHDF 1 protein, resulting in the antigen that should be given to T cells being digested and decomposed by dendritic cells themselves. Therefore, the researchers tried to eliminate the YTHDF 1 protein gene in dendritic cells. As a result, mice implanted with two kinds of cancer cells not only have smaller tumor tissue, but also have higher survival rate. It is worth mentioning that toxicity has not been observed in mice so far.
The research team believes that the elimination of YTHDF 1 protein gene not only improves the efficacy of PD- 1/PD-L 1 inhibitors, but more importantly, it brings new hopes and opportunities to more than 60% cancer patients who have adopted immunotherapy but have poor efficacy.