Cardiff University professor Awen Gallimore and her team are investigating how we can help our immune systems recognise and destroy breast cancer. Here, she explains more about her pioneering work which she hopes will help lead to more effective treatments for the disease.
Over the past two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has prompted much focus on the importance of immunity from disease. But what is the immune system and how can we harness its powers to fight not just coronavirus, but cancer too?
The immune system protects our body against illness, infection and disease and it can also protect us from cancer developing. However, breast cancer cells can develop sneaky ways of hiding from our immune system, which is why I'm working to find new ways to help it find and destroy cancer cells.
Breast Cancer Now funds my laboratory at Cardiff University where I'm trying to increase our understanding of the immune system so we can develop successful new treatments for triple negative breast cancer. This is an aggressive type of breast cancer that is more common in women with an inherited altered BRCA gene, women under 40 and Black women.
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Around 2,800 women are diagnosed with breast cancer in Wales every year, and over 400 of these women will have triple negative breast cancer. Behind these facts and figures are daughters, sisters, mothers and friends, who face a frightening reality of limited treatment options, and in the first few years after treatment, a higher risk of their cancer returning and spreading to other parts of the body. When breast cancer does spread, this is known as secondary (or metastatic) breast cancer and it sadly becomes incurable.
So how can we use our immune system to develop new treatments for this type of breast cancer? White blood cells are part of our immune system. T cells are a certain type of white blood cell that recognise unfamiliar substances, germs, and even cancer cells. When T cells recognise something abnormal, they trigger an immune response to fight what could be harming the body, to keep us healthy and well.
Drugs that harness the power of the immune system by stimulating it to recognise and act against disease, are called immunotherapies. Because every cancer is different immunotherapies are effective for some tumours more than others, and while they have been successfully developed for some cancers, few are effective for people with breast cancer.
Certain cancers, like skin cancers, can respond better to immunotherapy because the body's T cells have already infiltrated the tumour. However, most breast cancers lack T cells and without these it's harder for immunotherapy drugs to raise a good anti-cancer immune response.
So, the million-dollar question is how do we overcome this? Well, it gets a bit technical here but stay with me. My team and I are looking at a special type of T cell, called regulatory T cells. Regulatory T cells are particularly interesting because their job is to keep the rest of the immune system under control, so that it leaves our healthy tissues alone. But, sometimes regulatory T cells get it wrong and instruct the immune system to leave cancer cells alone as well.
Tackling regulatory T cells could be key to developing new cancer immunotherapies. We are investigating this ability of regulatory T cells to turn off anti-cancer immune responses. Once we know how regulatory T cells do this, our research will have the potential to develop improved immunotherapies that can overcome this problem.
Crucially, we hope that through this research we can develop new immunotherapies for triple negative breast cancer. This would be a huge step as these patients desperately need new and effective treatments.
Breast Cancer Now funds world-class research like mine that is taking place right across the UK, and it’s through this research that we hope to solve unanswered questions and accelerate progress, developing new therapies and treatments that bring patients hope for the future.
But we can't do this alone. We rely on the continued support of people across Wales who generously fundraise for Breast Cancer Now, so that the charity can keep funding world-class breast cancer research. Together, we will accelerate progress towards fewer cases, fewer deaths and a better quality of life for anyone affected by breast cancer.
For more information and to donate to Breast Cancer Now to help us to continue our world-class research visit https://breastcancernow.org/research.
