Dec 14, 2020 9:10am Improving the efficacy of immuno-oncology drugs in breast cancer was the focus of a new study led by researchers in Spain. (National Cancer Institute)
Amgen’s osteoporosis drug denosumab is approved as Xgeva for the prevention and treatment of some bone metastases in cancer. But could the drug’s mechanism of action help breast cancer patients respond to immunotherapy drugs that typically don’t work well in those tumors?
That was the premise behind a new study led by the Bellvitge Institute for Biomedical Research (IDIBELL) in Spain and partially funded by Amgen. The researchers studied cells from mouse models and from premenopausal patients with luminal breast cancer to determine whether Xgeva’s inhibition of a signaling pathway called RANK might make the tumor cells more sensitive to immunotherapy.
Osteoporosis drug also promotes infiltration of immune cells in breast tumors
The team of Eva González-Suarez, from the CNIO and IDIBELL, and the team of Christos Sotiriou, from the Jules Bordet Institute, demonstrate that a drug already used to treat osteoporosis promotes the infiltration of immune cells in breast tumors
These findings propose a new target to increase the antitumor immune response and make breast cancer more sensitive to immunotherapy
Despite the success of immunotherapy in the treatment of cancers such as lung or melanoma, it is still not effective in breast cancers for being cold , with low infiltration of immune cells.
Credit: IDIBELL
Despite the success of immunotherapy in the treatment of cancers such as lung or melanoma, it is still not effective in breast cancers for being cold , with low infiltration of immune cells. Tumours use strategies to evade immune surveillance by reducing the infiltration of cells that could attack them or by attracting immunosuppressive cells. These strategies can contribute to the poor prognosis observed in breast cancer of young women and make them unresponsive to immunotherapy. For this reason, the identification of a therapy that could convert immunologically cold tumours -in which immunotherapy is not effective- into warm tumours would represent an important step to increase the efficiency of immunological therapies for breast cancer, since these are based on the reactivation of immune cells to attack tumour cells.
Research Article
A combination of urinary biomarker panel and PancRISK score for earlier detection of pancreatic cancer: A case–control study
Silvana Debernardi, Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Project administration, Visualization, Writing – original draft
Affiliation Centre for Cancer Biomarkers and Biotherapeutics, Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom Roles Investigation, Validation
Affiliation Centre for Cancer Biomarkers and Biotherapeutics, Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom ⨯
Asma S. Algahmdi, Roles Investigation, Validation
Affiliation Centre for Cancer Biomarkers and Biotherapeutics, Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom Roles