UCF collaborates on breakthrough in fighting cancer
TAMPA, Fla. - Our bodies have natural defenses to help fight cancer, and researchers have discovered a new way to boost them in a lab. The University of Central Florida is part of a project designed to dissolve cancer from within.
It involves killer cells, a key component of our immune system. Killer cells seek and surround cancer cells to devour them.
"And we quickly learned that in testing natural killer cells, how potent these natural killer cells are," said UCF Research Technician Jeremiah Oyer.
We have killer cells coursing through our bodies, but now scientists at UCF are extracting them from donors and modifying them in their lab to make them much stronger.
Lab director Dr. Alicja Copik found the inspiration for this work through experiments and personal loss. She lost her mother to cancer, but watched her mom outlive expectations. She was not expected to live beyond a year of her diagnosis, and yet she fought that cancer for around ten years.
"I think part of her success was her strong immune system," she said.
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Dr. Copik focused on ways to fight cancer by potentially boosting immunity. Researchers had already been working on ways to boost killer cells that cancer patients already had inside them, but Copik said those treatments were toxic and she wanted to find a better way to do it.
"So we saw there was big hope, but we hope to have a way rather than making them grow in patients – a way to do it in a lab - large amounts with no side effects," said Copik.
In her UCF lab, researchers collect killer cells from donors and keep them in a red liquid that feeds them. As they multiply, the liquid turns a cloudy orange.
They put cells in a bioreactor to stimulate them. They mix in nanoparticles that stimulate two specific proteins, and then put them in a petri dish with cancer cells and watch them feast.
"The real moment is when we saw video of the natural killer cells actually killing tumors," Copik said. "You could see them just swarming the tumors and tearing it into pieces. We all were just amazed. It was like watching most amazing movie in your life."
The success of the lab experiments led to human trials that are still underway.
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If the trials show these modified killer cells are safe and effective in people, the pharmaceutical industry already has the means to mass produce them. Within the next five years, cancer patients across the nation could get injections of enhanced killer cells that could eat their cancer away.
"The cells have natural mechanisms to tell healthy cells from disease cells and, therefore, they don’t attack healthy cells of the patients, and therefore we can take them from anybody," said Copik.
