“Resolvin” Cancer by Clearing Accumulated Debris of Tumour Cells
One of the reasons that cancer is so hard to beat is the way that it ropes our immune system into working against us. Treatment kills off some cancer cells, but what’s left behind can “trick” our immune system into helping tumors to form.
Now a team including researchers Brigham and Women’s Hospital have shown that the dead and dying cancer cells generated by chemotherapy and targeted cancer therapy paradoxically trigger inflammation that promotes aggressive tumor growth.
Moreover, the scientists also demonstrated that this unintended consequence of cancer treatment can be halted by resolvins, a family of molecules naturally produced by the human body. The findings represent a novel treatment approach to preventing tumor growth and recurrence.
The team administered a variety of therapeutic drugs to lab-cultured cancer cells and collected the resulting debris. When co-injected into mice with a small number of non-growing cancer cells, the debris stimulated tumor formation.
A similar test treated mice with the chemotherapy drugs such as cisplatin and vincristine to generate debris in vivo, supporting the conclusion that the debris helped surviving cancer cells form tumors. The researchers concluded that a lipid called phosphatidylserine stimulated immune cells
to produce a “cytokine storm” when exposed to the cancerous cells and caused the growth.The researchers reasoned that if drug-generated debris was promoting tumor growth, clearing the debris might stop it. The team focused on the body’s own resolvins which act as stop signals to end or “resolve” the inflammation. Resolvins counter the debris-stimulated proinflammatory cytokines and stimulate the immune system including white blood cells called macrophages (“the big eaters”) to remove or “mop up” the debris.
Resolvins are biosynthesized by the body from omega-3 essential fatty acids. Resolvins were discovered at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital by Dr. Serhan and his laboratory and are a new approach to turn off inflammation in the human body to prevent a “cytokine storm” rather than blocking a single pro-inflammatory factor
Treating mice with small amounts of resolvins inhibited the subsequent therapy-stimulated tumor growth and prevented cancer cells from spreading. Resolvin treatment enhanced the activity of several cytotoxic therapies against a variety of tumor types resulting in tumor regression. Clinical developments using resolvins as potential therapeutic approaches are already in progress for several inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases.
The findings open the door to a new approach to prevent cancer recurrence as well as treatment by adding resolvins to existing chemotherapy of targeted therapy regimens. Already in clinical development as a potential treatment for other inflammatory disease including eczema, periodontal disease and various neurodegenerative disease, resolvins have proven to be non-toxic and come with minimal side-effects.
