the immune system will identify cancer cells before eliminating them. « Medicine in the Library

Immunotherapy — which uses the body’s immune system to attack cancer cells — has become a powerful tool for fighting cancer. But, for reasons that aren’t clear, tumors evade immune cells, making them resistant to these therapies.

Now a new study conducted by scientists of the Fox Chase Cancer Center of Philadelphia shows how a process called DNA methylation can regulate the immune response in colorectal cancer, laying the groundwork for potential new treatments. DNA methylation and demethylation is a balanced process that regulates gene expression. Methylation suppresses genes and essentially turns them off, while demethylation turns them back on.

“By blocking this demethylation pathway, we can make these cancer cells very sensitive to being killed by natural killer cells, which are immune cells.”said Alfonso Bellacosa, MD, PhD, lead author of the study and professor of Nuclear Dynamics and Cancer research.

“The key finding, in both mouse and human models, is that high levels of DNA methylation correlate with high levels of inflammatory response and interferon.”says Prof. Beautiful thing. «This is independent of the pathways we currently associate with the inflammatory response in colon cancer and represents a completely new and unexpected finding.».

In the final stage of the experiments, the researchers exposed colon cancer cells to “killer” immune cells. By blocking genes that trigger demethylation, they made cancer cells much more vulnerable to being killed by immune cells. “This provides a potential new way to make cancer cells more sensitive to immunotherapy. Drugs that could inhibit this pathway will therefore be the first step towards creating new epigenetic therapies that will increase awareness of immunotherapy”concluded the researcher.

Read abstract of the article:
TET1 and TDG Suppress Inflammatory Response in Intestinal Tumorigenesis: Implications for Colorectal Tumors With the CpG Island Methylator Phenotype
Rossella Tricarico, Jozef Madzo, Gabrielle Scher,…Timothy J. Yen, Jean-Pierre Issa, Alfonso Bellacosa
Gastroenterology Published:February 07, 2023 DOI:

Source: Fox Chase Cancer Center