Immunity and cancer: adjust the work of T-regulators

The fear of an autoimmune reaction prevents the immune system from destroying cancer

Kirill Stasevich, CompulentaImmunity is prescribed not only to catch viruses and bacteria entering the body, but also to monitor the appearance of malignant cells.

And if the tumor did occur, it means that the immune system for some reason ignored it.

Theoretically, a tumor can be expelled from the body if you wake up the immune system and point it to malignant cells. However, a simple activation of immune cells is fraught with the fact that they will begin to attack not only cancer cells, but also healthy ones, that is, an autoimmune reaction will occur.

In other words, the problem is fine-tuning immunity. It is vital that he "eats" cancer cells and does not touch ordinary ones.

Researchers from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (USA) seem to have solved this problem. Wayne Hancock and his colleagues proceeded from the fact that when a cancerous tumor arises, the immune system is simply afraid to start military operations in order not to inadvertently offend the "civilian population". In other words, the anti-cancer response is hindered by the department of the immune system that is responsible for suppressing the autoimmune reaction. And the "extreme" here are special T-regulatory cells called Foxp3+.

The key role in these cells is played by the Foxp3 protein: it is on it that the suppression of the autoimmune response depends. It occurred to the researchers that if the activity of this protein is suppressed, the immune system will begin to respond to the tumor. And so it happened: after disabling the p300 gene, on which the work of Foxp3 depended, the cells slowed down their anti-autoimmune activity, which affected the state of the tumor. Her growth was slowing down, while there were no signs of an autoimmune reaction.

The experiments were carried out on mice, so now it's up to clinical trials on humans. If a drug is created that affects the key proteins of Foxp3+ T-regulators, with its help, it seems, it will be possible to slow down the development of any tumor.

It is also worth recalling that immune T-regulators are often paid attention to because of the problem of transplantation. However, in this case, their activity is greatly increased in order to protect the transplanted organ from autoimmune rejection as much as possible.

The results of the study are published in Nature Medicine: Liu et al., Inhibition of p300 impairs Foxp3+ T regulatory cell function and promotes antitumor immunity.

Prepared based on the materials of Medical Xpress: Dialing back treg cell function boosts the body's cancer-fighting immune activity.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru20.08.2013