The immune system is your body’s resident doctor. Immune cells constantly examine the organs and tissues in your body. Most of the time, immune cells eliminate damaged or infected cells before they can make you sick. However, this process goes wrong in cancer. We now know that tumors use multiple strategies to hide from immune cells so that they can grow and spread throughout the body.
A new kind of medicine, called immunotherapy, teaches the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer. Some patients treated with immunotherapy cleared their tumors and remained in remission for decades – the closest we’ve come to a cancer cure. However, most patients with colorectal cancer, the second deadliest cancer in the US, do not benefit from existing immunotherapies. It is thought that these patients’ cancers have developed different or additional strategies to hide from immune cells – but how?
One way that immune cells examine cancer cells is by detecting the sugars, or glycans, they display on their surfaces. It was recently discovered that colorectal tumors decorate their surfaces with sugars that trick the immune system into thinking the tumor cells are healthy cells. Thus, glycans are emerging as a main strategy used by colorectal cancers to evade the immune system. This project will develop medicines that target these glycans as a new kind of immunotherapy. Our hope is that medicines targeting sugars can help improve outcomes for all patients with colorectal cancer.
