The battle against blood cancer is never over even in patients whose immune systems have fought back against the disease. In an aggressive form of leukemia known as myelodysplastic/myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS/MS), transplant rejection is also present and patients are limited to receiving infusions of infusions of infusions of DNA or RNA, a common immunotherapy protocol used to treat disease.
In a study published in the journal Blood Advances, researchers report the first proof that infusions of an engineered protein into mice, called mycoadhesive protein 3 (MPM-3) full-length, can boost the prognosis of patients with MDS/MS.
“Since the inception of DNA and RNA viruses in the 1980s, cancer patients have had difficult time fighting off the infection but now we have succeeded in giving them a ‘more favourable’ immune response so that they can fight the virus better. In a few years’ time they will not only fight viral infections but also fight acute radiation infections such as acute radiation from the surgical scalpel,” says senior author Dr. Jumping-jong-sensei Tsuda, from the Lung Cancer Centre at the National Cancer Center of the University of Tokyo. “This is the very first used for treating acute radiation-associated cancers.”
In the study, mice faced with infusions of MDS/MS bone marrow cells, mice would slowly lose their stability due to the degradation of the bone marrow lining by toxic overgrowth factor signaling. STR3 3 is a genetically engineered protein that can harness the overgrowth effect of MDS/MS bone marrow in a mouse plate to promote the development of bone bone depth and speed up the rate of repair. Stimulation of MDS/MS bone marrow stem cells by MPM-3 was employed to promote the regeneration of their blood supply.
“Both acute radiation and radiation therapy induce the overgrowth effect of MDS/MS, so we suggested infusions of MDS/MS-derived mycoadhesive protein 3 (MPM-3) in the treatment protocol,” says Prof. Hideki Ando, Head of the Tokyo Institute of Cancer Biology and Molecular Biology (TCMB) and the Tokyo University of Science. “We did not target the structure-activity relationship that was strongly associated with MDS/MS, but instead tailored it to the type of leukemia then encountered by patients.”