New research describes how re-educated macrophages can eat tumours

New research, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, has described how immunosuppressive macrophages may be ‘re-educated’ to fight off and eat tumorous cells.

Led by Ashish Kulkarni — an assistant professor in the Chemical Engineering Department (ChE) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst — the team have engineered a self-assembled nanomaterial that has the ability to re-educate the macrophages to be anti-tumorigenic.

Usually, macrophages are the first line of defence in the human immune system, however, cancer cells have the ability exploit certain mechanisms and recruit the cells to enable their spread to other parts of the body.

By re-educating the macrophages, not only have the team been able to reverse their recruitment by the cancer but also found that they were able to enhance the macrophage ability to eat the cancer cells effectively.

In their laboratory studies, the team noted that at a lower dose of the nanomaterial therapy, growth of the cancer cells was halted more effectively and in the case of two aggressive tumours, spread of the disease was prevented, in animal models when compared with current macrophage-targeted therapies.

“This approach could be used as an immunotherapy to re-educate the macrophages in different cancers and could be combined with other immunotherapies such as immune checkpoint inhibitors,” stated Kulkarni in a story featured on the University of Massachussetts Amherst’s website.

Speaking to BBC News, Carl Alexander, from Cancer Research UK, said: “It's promising to see yet another new approach. More work is now needed to show that this approach could be used to treat cancer patients.”