To grow, cancer tumors must hijack the immune system for their needs. One of the main tricks that most tumors use is to manipulate a type of immune cell called a macrophage, causing it to protect the tumor from the rest of the immune system, recruit blood vessels and help the cancer spread to other tissues.
Now researchers in Prof. Ido Amit’s lab at the Weizmann Institute of Science have used state-of-the-art gene editing and single-cell and AI technologies to identify a master switch that turns macrophages into cancer helpers.
Based on this discovery, the team developed a new therapy that was shown to be effective in mice with bladder tumors, one of the most common types of cancer in humans and one for which only limited therapeutic innovations are currently available. The discovery is presented in a paper published in the journal Cancer Cell.
