According to a statement released on Monday by Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, an international team of researchers has found a new way to combat cancers that no longer respond to treatment by utilizing the same mutations that make tumors resistant to drugs.
When a therapy fails, it is one of the most difficult problems in cancer treatment. Drugs that initially function in many metastatic malignancies eventually lose their effectiveness as cancer cells continue to proliferate and evolve.
A computational method called SpotNeoMet, which finds therapy-resistant mutations common to many patients, was developed in the latest study, which was published in Cancer Discovery.
Neo-antigens, which are small protein fragments produced by these mutations, are exclusive to cancer cells. New immunotherapy strategies that encourage the immune system to target cancer cells specifically may be based on these shared neo-antigens.
The majority of individuals with metastatic prostate cancer eventually develop resistance to conventional treatments, therefore the researchers tested their strategy on this condition.
In laboratory tests and mouse models, they discovered three neo-antigens that demonstrated encouraging outcomes. The strategy, according to the researchers, is different from highly customized medicines in that it targets resistance genes that many individuals share, enabling the same medication to be administered more widely to patients with cancer that is resistant to treatment.
