Scientists are working on a powerful new weapon against cancer The tiny implants act like drug factories in the body and wipe out tumors

Early results from new research promise that we have a new and powerful way to fight mesothelioma, an aggressive form of lung cancer.

Scientists have managed to prevent advanced cancer in mice by implanting tiny ‘drug factories’. This new type of treatment only takes a few days to become effective.

Although it will take some time for this approach to be tested and implemented in humans, early results promise that we have a new and powerful way to fight mesothelioma, an aggressive form of lung cancer.

Said “drug factories” consist of tiny spheres made of alginate, each just 1.5 millimeters wide and designed to produce continuous bursts of interleukin-2 (IL-2). This natural compound activates white blood cells to fight tumors.

• I care for patients who have malignant pleural mesothelioma. This is a very aggressive malignant tumor of the lining of the lung and is very difficult to completely cure with surgical resection, says thoracic surgeon and surgical oncologist Brian Burt of the private Baylor School of Medicine in Houston, USA.

In other words, there is often an underlying disease. Treating this residual disease with local immunotherapy, the local delivery of relatively high doses of immunotherapy into the pleural space, is a very attractive way to treat this disease, Barth explains.

That “pleural space” refers to the layer of tissue that covers the lungs, where mesothelioma tumors also develop. Part of the success of treatment depends on how it is locally targeted. The team also combined the implants with what’s known as a checkpoint inhibitor, a type of drug that doesn’t fight cancer directly, but instead trains the immune system to better identify and eliminate cancer cells. An inhibitor that targets the PD-1 protein was used here.

Thus, the tiny implants wiped out tumors in more than half of the animals tested. Combined with a checkpoint inhibitor in seven mice, the tumors were completely destroyed.

What our data shows is that delivering these immunotherapy particles, regionally, to these mice that have mesothelioma, has very provocative and very effective treatment responses.

“In fact, I have not seen these mesothelioma tumors eradicated in mice with the efficacy that we have in this mouse model,” Barth says.

From the results the scientists obtained, they believe there is a good chance that the treatment can effectively train the body’s memory T cells to fight mesothelioma again, should it recur. Their research was published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research .

While IL-2 treatments have been shown to be effective, they can also have some pretty serious side effects. This is another area where the targeted nature of the new therapy can help, as it is limited to the parts of the body that are exposed to the drug.

What’s more, the same factory drug ball technique has already been used by some of the same researchers in an attempt to tackle ovarian cancer, and human clinical trials for that treatment are set to begin in the next few months. It is a treatment that has the potential to go beyond mesothelioma.

• From the beginning, our goal was to develop a platform therapy that could be used for many different types of immune system disorders or different types of cancer, says bioengineer Amanda Nash of Rice University in Texas.