"Safety cloud" covers the field of tumor immunotherapy

Source: Biovalley 2015-01-28 cancer, has been the object that scientists all over the world try to conquer For this reason, people have developed chemotherapy, radiotherapy and other means to kill tumor cells However, these therapies are either not powerful enough to inhibit the crazy growth of tumor cells, or they can damage the enemy by 800 As scientists understand the immune system, they begin to realize that the human immune system may be the best weapon to solve this problem In 2014, the field of biomedical research started a research boom of tumor immunotherapy Among them, car-t therapy and bispecific antibody therapy are the most dazzling Car-t therapy is to isolate T cells in patients, then connect these T cells with specific antibody fragments by means of genetic engineering, after amplification in vitro, they are transported back to patients, and then kill tumor cells specifically Because these T cells come from the patients themselves, they can avoid the rejection caused by different substances in the body Bispecific antibody is a breakthrough in antibody research Traditional Y-type antibody can only recognize one antigen Scientists have constructed the bispecific antibody by recombination, which can target specific tumor cells and recognize T cells at the same time This makes the efficiency of tumor cells presenting to T cells greatly enhanced, and also makes the effect of immunotherapy have a qualitative leap Clinical research on leukemia treatment shows that 40% - 90% of the patients can not even detect the presence of cancer cells after treatment It's no wonder that some analysts have given an almost impossible figure of $100 billion to the size of the tumor immune market in the future If these programs have the same effect on solid tumor treatment, then the market will continue to expand Safety cloud covers tumor immunotherapy Many people may think that the prospect of human anti-cancer seems to be great It seems that the time for human to completely cure tumor is not far away However, a qualified scientist should always be rational At a time when tumor immunotherapy was almost mythical, many scientists began to formalize the potential safety risks of this therapy In a word, the hidden dangers of these immunotherapies mainly focus on two points First of all, these two therapies have broken through the limits of the immune system, making T cells recognize and kill tumor cells with unprecedented high efficiency The number and speed of antibodies produced by the immune system should be greatly accelerated, which is the main reason that tumor cells can be killed in a short time However, the death of a large number of tumor cells may lead to the release of various cytokines in tumor cells These cytokines will cause a series of chain reactions in patients, and eventually lead to side effects such as inflammation, hypotension, and even death of patients Secondly, taking leukemia, the most studied indication of car-t therapy and bispecific antibody therapy, as an example, most immunotherapies target a specific protein named CD19 However, the protein is distributed in a small amount in many normal tissues, so when T cells are enriched in the body, the risk of autoimmunity will be greatly increased At the same time, experts from the US FDA also said that since immunotherapy actually changes the balance of the immune system in the body, it is difficult to determine the exact cause of this side effect, which is why some traditional methods to inhibit autoimmunity do not work in this emerging therapy Recently, two patients died abnormally in the clinical research of related products of Juno company, the pioneer of car-t therapy, which also cast a shadow on the prospect of tumor immunotherapy Obviously, many biomedical companies have also recognized this problem Some car-t therapists have added a special "suicide switch" for enriched T cells to ensure that these T cells will not injure healthy tissues after clearing the target The prospect of tumor immunotherapy although tumor immunotherapy still faces such and such problems, it does not prevent all parties to regard it as the star of cancer treatment tomorrow At present, various biomedical giants, including Juno, kit, Novartis and Amgen, are all committed to the development of car-t therapy, while Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Lilly are also developing more than 30 kinds of bispecific antibody drugs It is estimated that the price of these drugs will be as high as $300000-500000 after they are put on the market Last month, the FDA approved the first bispecific antibody drug, blincyt, developed by Amgen, for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia The clinical research of car-t therapy of Novartis has also made remarkable achievements It can be predicted that the rise of tumor immunotherapy will bring a reshuffle opportunity for the entire pharmaceutical industry!