Researchers have found a novel way to use immunotherapy drugs against treatment-resistant cancer that starts in white blood cells called lymphocytes, by combining them with stem cell transplantation.
The approach, described in the journal Cancer Discovery, also dramatically increased the success of the drugs in melanoma and lung cancer.
This type of immunotherapy, called “checkpoint blockade,” ramps up the ability of immune cells called T cells to fight cancer by removing the “cloaking effect” that tumours use to hide from them.
Checkpoint blockade therapy is effective in several tumour types, but generally ineffective in non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas, said researchers from the Mount Sinai Hospital in the US.
However, the study found that when this immunotherapy is combined with a stem cell transplant, which the researchers call “immunotransplant,” the process ramps up the T cells to increase the cancer-killing immune response tenfold.