Boosting iNKT cells improves blood cancer immunotherapy

Australian researchers have discovered a new clue to improving immunotherapy to fight blood cancers such as leukaemia and myeloma, with their results published in the journal Blood Advances.

A new type of immunotherapy called T cell engaging bispecific therapy has shown great potential for treating blood cancers and is already being widely tested in clinical trials. It acts like a missile control system by alerting and guiding the body’s own T cells to attack and eliminate blood cancer cells. However, it has remained unclear precisely how this process works, and unlocking the science behind it is critical to further developing and improving the treatment to ensure better long-term results.

Now research led by QIMR Berghofer cancer immunologist Dr Kyohei Nakamura has discovered that a much less common type of immune cell, known as an invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cell, is like the key that turns on the missile control system enabling the immunotherapy to guide the T cells to destroy the cancer cells. By boosting the numbers of these iNKT cells, the immunotherapy is significantly more effective.

“Until now, iNKT cells have been underestimated,” said Nakamura, who is Head of QIMR Berghofer’s Immune Targeting in Blood Cancers Laboratory. “Our research for the first time shows how important these iNKT cells are and their critical role in boosting the efficacy of the T cell engaging bispecific therapy. We believe that this study fills in the gaps in our understanding of how the immune system is working during this therapy.”

QIMR Berghofer’s Mika Casey, the lead author of the study, said iNKT cells are scarce in the body, and numbers are even lower in cancer patients, but they can be boosted using a relatively straightforward vaccine approach to stimulate their production.

“These iNKT cells are powerful but also they are quite rare in number,” Casey said. “Boosting the numbers of these iNKT cells has been shown to be effective and safe in patients with multiple myeloma. We hope this approach could be a new fundamental strategy for T cell engaging bispecific therapy.”

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Andrea Danti

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