Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:
Today, many people who receive cancer diagnoses have more treatment options than in the past. However, for some cancers, like pancreatic cancer, surgery and chemotherapy remain the only available therapies.
Tatiana Hurtado de Mendoza, a cancer biologist at the University of California, San Diego, was motivated to explore better options to cancer treatments. “I’ve had a lot of cancer in the family, and my grandmother and my mom they all refuse any type of traditional chemotherapy or radiotherapy. So, I’ve always been very keen on finding immunotherapy approaches that would not involve any cytotoxic agents.” While cancer immunotherapies have been breakthrough options for targeting and killing tumors more specifically than chemotherapy, for example, these treatments have their own limitations. They rely upon the expression of unique tumor antigens, struggle to overcome immunosuppressive tumor microenvironments, and remain costly.
To address the obstacles of cost and lack of specific tumor antigens in some cancers, Hurtado de Mendoza explored using a tumor-targeting peptide to direct antigens to tumor sites after systemic delivery.1,2 Other researchers have explored leveraging individuals’ existing immunity against previous infections to fight tumors. For example, immunologist David Masopust at the University of Minnesota and his group demonstrated that injecting viral peptides into tumors in mice previously infected with the same virus activated T cells that migrated to and killed the tumor.3
More here.
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