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Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

nature.com

21–30 of 44 posts

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#21

Stupid/insensitive question: what if cancer were a species "feature" earned through evolution that helps reap people who made it through their reproductive years without accident or disease but are now more hindrance than help to the species?

Because evolution doesn't work on a species level, it works on a gene level. Genes that help propagate themselves spread more. A cancer causing gene would almost certainly be selected against, vs a gene that caused you to live longer and have more children - and spread more copies of itself. The reason people die is not because it's better for evolution. It's because evolution simply doesn't care about maximizing lif…

I think you are arguing on two different levels. I'm a professor biologist and though it strikes me as a pretty indirect mechanism (arguing the effect size could be small), I see some merit to the commenter's idea.

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#22

Stupid/insensitive question: what if cancer were a species "feature" earned through evolution that helps reap people who made it through their reproductive years without accident or disease but are now more hindrance than help to the species?

Then we bring back gladiatorial combats and require all people over 90 and in good physical condition to participate. I'd rather die on the arena in combat, than waste away in a hospital bed.

More seriously, I rather doubt the entire world would reach immortality-from-aging once we manage to slightly improve cancer care. If it turns out to be a species-killer, the most advanced societies will die out first and the ones picking up the pieces will learn from their(our) mistakes.

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#23

Stupid/insensitive question: what if cancer were a species "feature" earned through evolution that helps reap people who made it through their reproductive years without accident or disease but are now more hindrance than help to the species?

Because evolution doesn't work on a species level, it works on a gene level. Genes that help propagate themselves spread more. A cancer causing gene would almost certainly be selected against, vs a gene that caused you to live longer and have more children - and spread more copies of itself. The reason people die is not because it's better for evolution. It's because evolution simply doesn't care about maximizing lif…

> Because evolution doesn't work on a species level, it works on a gene level. Genes that help propagate themselves spread more.

I don't think that's necessarily the case. If my descendants were able to reproduce more because of my gene that reaped me before I was a drain on their resources, that gene could be inherited by them.

IIRC I vaguely recall something about male homosexuality being correlated with female siblings' increased offspring count. It's a stretch to say that they'd be caused by the same gene but it would be an interesting phenomenon which might be a net benefit to the species.

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#24
This is certainly an interesting and theoretically promising method, that, if it works, should make it fairly easy to develop specific personalized "vaccines" for each person's cancer.

For background, dendritic cells are a type of antigen-presenting cells, which means their job is to pick up proteins, break them up into small pieces (antigens), and then show those pieces to T-cells, whereupon the T-cells can either say "looks like a self antigen, everything's fine" or say "that looks like a foreign antigen, raise the alarm!" and then initiate a specific immune response against that antigen.

The basic concept here is that if you have a specific protein that you want to raise an immune response against, you can do so by tricking dendritic cells into producing copies of that protein, which will then get presented along with all the other antigens for inspection by T-cells. You can pull off this trick by feeding RNA that encodes the target protein to the dendritic cells, and as a bonus, the fact that there's free RNA floating around triggers anti-viral defenses, which causes the T-cells to be extra suspicious of the antigens they're inspecting (i.e. it lowers their threshold for raising an immune response). But injecting RNA directly into your spleen isn't exactly practical, so instead they found that attaching the negatively charged RNA to some positively charged lipids in a specific ratio (which results in a specific ratio of charge to mass) causes them to localize to the spleen and then get taken up, translated, and presented by dendritic cells when injected intravenously.

So, put it all together, and the workflow for treating cancer looks something like this:

1. Find a protein produced by the cancer cells that is either sufficiently different from the same protein in normal cells (due to mutation) or not produced in normal cells.

2. Construct an RNA transcript that will produce that protein when translated.

3. Attach that RNA transcript to the liposomes in the appropriate ratio, and inject it into your bloodstream.

4. Let the immune system do its thing.

5. Repeat as necessary to keep the immune response active until it's killed all the cancer.

Obviously step 1 is still the hard part, and the paper chose as a proof of concept two example cancers for which this step was already done. But finding a viable cancer-specific antigen is certainly orders of magnitude easier than determining the mechanism of a cancer and then developing a treatment specific to that mechanism.

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#25
post #5

Paywall: I read this as an ability to help in immunotherapy which works like a vaccine. I really am interested in what types of cancer this works with the strongest effect. They list soft tumors in Lungs. The bellow citation seems to show that these are something that could work on all cancer types and is cheap. These are exciting times. Now it will be another 5 years till we see this even in a trial for children? (S…

Assuming this kind of therapy is effective in humans, the rate-limiting step is identifying a protein in the cancer that is either not produced in normal cells or sufficiently mutated relative to the same protein in normal cells, such that the immune system targeting that protein will only kill cancer cells. Otherwise you'd just induce autoimmune disease.

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#26

Stupid/insensitive question: what if cancer were a species "feature" earned through evolution that helps reap people who made it through their reproductive years without accident or disease but are now more hindrance than help to the species?

you could argue that, most evolution conclusions are based on visible outcomes and the assumption it has utility, rather than actually proving it has more utility over a failed line of evolution that researchers will never see

I would like to point out that many mammals have more genetic safe guards than humans do against cancer cells, so my conclusion is that humans have a flaw

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#27

Stupid/insensitive question: what if cancer were a species "feature" earned through evolution that helps reap people who made it through their reproductive years without accident or disease but are now more hindrance than help to the species?

Because evolution doesn't work on a species level, it works on a gene level. Genes that help propagate themselves spread more. A cancer causing gene would almost certainly be selected against, vs a gene that caused you to live longer and have more children - and spread more copies of itself. The reason people die is not because it's better for evolution. It's because evolution simply doesn't care about maximizing lif…

I take issue with your first statement- evolution certainly works at the species level (in the sense that population genetics is a thing). It does appear there is a population fitness that is selected for when two desirable phenotypes can't be accomodated in a single individual.

Also, "Most organisms die long before they get cancer, so the fitness of a gene that prevents cancer is pretty small." ignores the fact that there are genes preventing cancer (tumor suppressors), and those genes are under active selection.

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#28
post #5

Paywall: I read this as an ability to help in immunotherapy which works like a vaccine. I really am interested in what types of cancer this works with the strongest effect. They list soft tumors in Lungs. The bellow citation seems to show that these are something that could work on all cancer types and is cheap. These are exciting times. Now it will be another 5 years till we see this even in a trial for children? (S…

Assuming this kind of therapy is effective in humans, the rate-limiting step is identifying a protein in the cancer that is either not produced in normal cells or sufficiently mutated relative to the same protein in normal cells, such that the immune system targeting that protein will only kill cancer cells. Otherwise you'd just induce autoimmune disease.

This was my first thought when I read it. How do you aim it(?).

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#29

This is certainly an interesting and theoretically promising method, that, if it works, should make it fairly easy to develop specific personalized "vaccines" for each person's cancer. For background, dendritic cells are a type of antigen-presenting cells, which means their job is to pick up proteins, break them up into small pieces (antigens), and then show those pieces to T-cells, whereupon the T-cells can either s…

Great summary, thanks for that. This therapy appears fairly elegant. Let's hope it makes it through trials.

Re: Cancer therapy by RNA delivery to dendritic cells

#30

This is certainly an interesting and theoretically promising method, that, if it works, should make it fairly easy to develop specific personalized "vaccines" for each person's cancer. For background, dendritic cells are a type of antigen-presenting cells, which means their job is to pick up proteins, break them up into small pieces (antigens), and then show those pieces to T-cells, whereupon the T-cells can either s…

Good summary. That Nature issue also has a commentary on the paper that provides a summary in the broader context: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
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