'Natural killers' potential new cancer weapon

Doctors are well aware that cancer treatment can be a double-edged sword, particularly for tiny patients like babies and young children.

Although chemotherapy can be highly effective at destroying cancer in kids, it is also toxic and can leave them with life-long problems including cognitive problems or health issues like diabetes.

The Cancer Immunology team at Telethon Kids is investigating how the body's 'natural killer' cells can be harnessed to fight cancer – whilst also protecting kids from nasty chemotherapy side effects.

Telethon Kids cancer researcher Dr Bree Foley said the main advantage of using cellular therapy to treat cancer in kids was that cancer patients would receive less exposure to chemotherapy and other drugs.

"Conventional cancer treatments are still very toxic," Dr Foley said. "This is particularly true of brain tumours – patients receive radiation to the brain and will often have cognitive problems for the rest of their lives.

"We need to have better, safer and more effective treatments for childhood cancers."

Dr Foley's latest research, still at the pre-clinical stage, focuses on engineering a type of immune cell known as a natural killer or 'NK' cell.

"They're called natural killer cells because they're exactly that – immune cells that have naturally evolved to eliminate cancer in the body," Dr Foley said.

This new cellular therapy using NK cells will be able to be used to treat many more patients than the existing T-cell immunotherapy – which involves taking immune cells from the patient, engineering them in the lab so they can recognise cancer cells, making up a huge army of these T-cells, and then infusing them back into the body to fight the cancer.

Dr Foley said while the clinical response rates for T-cell immunotherapy were over 90 per cent, not all patients could have their immune cells harvested for the treatment.

"Previous cancer treatments the patient might have received, such as chemotherapy or other drugs, have often damaged their immune cells too much, so we can't engineer their T-cells to fight the cancer," she said.

"In the cases of little babies who are diagnosed with leukaemia, they don't have fully developed immune systems yet – so they don't have the T-cells to donate."

Using NK cells overcomes this problem, as these cells are readily taken from the blood and can be transferred from a healthy person to the patient.

"The goal with NK cell therapy is to have an off-the-shelf approach," Dr Foley said.

"We could create a bank of donated NK cells that are engineered to target the cancer, waiting in the freezer, ready to use to treat a patient as soon as the cancer is detected."