Certain immune cells can recognise and fight cancer cells. Polish researchers want to take them from the patient's blood, multiply them and send them to fight the cancer.

Cancer cells are still being produced in the body. Normally, the immune system is able to fight the rebellious cells, but it happens that cancer cells escape its attention.

- Every cancer is slightly different. Cancer cells differ little from healthy cells in the body, and the mutations that occur in them are often unique to the patient's tumour. For this reason, the fight against cancer is very difficult. Researchers are simply often unable to identify a specific marker, i.e. a feature that would allow a cancer cell to be distinguished from a normal cell without error," notes the centre's director, Professor Natalia Marek-Trzonkowska.

- This is why we are working on a personalised cell vaccine for the treatment of lung cancer. The drug will be produced individually for each patient. We believe that tumours are characterised by so much variability that it would be ineffective to use the same cell vaccine for all patients. For the therapy, we are using cells of the immune system, something that occurs naturally in the body. We would like to prepare these cells so that they are insensitive to the immunosuppressive effects of the tumour. Perhaps later we will be able to use this knowledge to prepare vaccines targeting other cancers, adds the professor.

The premise of the project is to recognise certain specific populations of T lymphocytes in the blood, which in turn are able to recognise the cancer. These cells would be selected from the blood, multiplied outside the patient's body, perhaps also supported there to fight the tumour, and then delivered to the area around the cancer to start the fight. As part of the therapy, the patient would receive their own multiplied immune cells

The researchers hope that the risk of side effects would be low. These cells are able to distinguish between a healthy and a cancerous cell.

Preliminary, as yet unpublished work (carried out in vitro and in vivo on animals for the time being) suggests that such lymphocytes weaned by the researchers selectively destroy cancer cells while tolerating healthy and normal cells.