Oral immunotherapy

The first cancer immunotherapy pill is ready for clinical trials

Georgy Golovanov, Hi-tech+

Today, immunotherapeutic drugs that can be taken orally exist only for the treatment of allergies. Cancer patients are forced to regularly seek help from specialists to make an intravenous injection. An international group of scientists has developed oral cancer immunotherapy. If the clinical trials are successful, the world will see the first immunotherapy pills that help the body destroy cancer cells.

Since cancer begins to develop from healthy cells, the immune system does not always recognize it as a foreign formation. Taking certain antibodies helps the body to start fighting the tumor, which increases the chances of the patient without the serious side effects inherent in chemotherapy. This method was proposed back in the 80s. The catch is that antibodies do not survive in the acidic environment of the human digestive tract, so attempts to create immunotherapeutic drugs for oral administration have not been successful.

However , researchers from Tel Aviv University believe they have found a solution. They have developed an artificial molecule that acts in the same way as one of the most common immunotherapies: it prevents the suppression of the immune system by two proteins, PD-1 and PD-L1. This molecule can withstand absorption through the walls of the human intestine without disintegrating, reports ZME Science.

Article by Acúrcio et al. Therapeutic targeting of PD-1/PD-L1 blockade by novel small-molecule inhibitors recruits cytotoxic T cells into solid tumor microenvironment published in Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer – VM.

"The new molecule has many advantages. It can be given orally, it is cheaper to produce than antibodies, and penetrates into more tumor sites than antibodies," said Professor Ronit Sathi—Fainaro, head of the Cancer Biology Research Center.

In addition, artificial molecules are almost 300 times smaller than traditional antibodies. Therefore, they can get to clusters of cancer cells located away from blood vessels. This increases the effectiveness of immunotherapy.

However, the biggest advantage of the molecule over antibody immunotherapy is the price. The production of biological preparations requires a complex infrastructure and qualified personnel. The cost of a full course for one patient is about $200,000 per year, which not everyone can afford. The synthesized version of therapy is made much faster, and its cost is much lower.

So far, the therapy has been tested in vitro and on human cancer cells in a model animal organism, confirming the effectiveness of controlling tumor growth at the level of the PD-L1 antibody. The most difficult clinical trials are ahead.

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