Hitting two targets on the cancer cell could greatly increase the power of antibody therapy to kill ovarian cancer.
A new two-pronged approach could kill ovarian cancer.
Antibody therapy is a type of immune therapy, or immunotherapy, that uses enhanced antibodies to identify disease targets and then kill them or summon immune cells to kill them.
Its success in treating ovarian cancer and other solid tumors, however, has been somewhat limited.
A reason for this is the hostile microenvironment of the tumor, which makes it hard for antibodies designed to kill cancer cells to reach them.
Now, scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine in Charlottesville have developed an approach that looks set to overcome this barrier.
They describe their "single-agent dual-specificity targeting" method for ovarian cancer in a study paper that features in the journal Cancer Cell.
The approach uses a "two-pronged" antibody that hits two targets on the ovarian cancer cell.
One target is a protein called folate receptor alpha-1 (FOLR1), which is highly expressed in ovarian cancer. The antibody uses this target to home in on the cancer cell and "anchor" itself to it. The other target is another protein called death receptor 5. By binding to this protein, the antibody activates cell death.
"There are a lot of efforts," says study senior author Jogender Tushir-Singh, who is an assistant professor in biochemistry and molecular genetics, "in terms of cancer immune therapy, but the success of these are really limited in solid tumors."
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