Cancer is one of the most fatal diseases and timely diagnosis and early treatment have prompted to effectively treat the condition and increase life expectancy in patients. According to a recent report, the use of cosmetic lasers, created at the Massachusetts General Hospital may improve the effectiveness of certain anti-cancer therapies.
The laser method may also help in the expansion of the treatment method to handle some other types of cancer.
The procedure has already been tested in mice and proven to be effective, said the study published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The study also states that immune checkpoint inhibitors are important medications that boost the immune system's response against various cancers.
However, not all patients get help from such drugs, as the cancer cells in these patients frequently experience multiple mutations. Therefore, it can be taken as foreign by the immune system which may cause inflammation in the body. Hence, to develop the benefits of these immune checkpoints, researchers first carried experiments in mice having poor immunogenic melanoma that is not blocked by immune checkpoint inhibitors. It was found that when cancerous cells were exposed to ultraviolet radiation; the radiation caused more mutations to the cell, which made immune checkpoint inhibitors efficient at boosting the immune response against cancer.
The enhanced response included an immune attack against non-mutated proteins in the tumour, a process called "epitope spreading."
Fisher, one of the researchers of the study, explains the process, "Epitope spreading could be important because many human cancers do not have very high mutation numbers, and correspondingly do not respond well to immunotherapy, so a treatment that can safely target non-mutated proteins could be valuable.”
Finding another alternative for the response triggered by mutations after ultraviolet radiation was also initiated, considering it is likely not to add extra mutations to a patient's tumour as a treatment therapy.
"We discovered that use of a cosmetic laser, also known as a fractional laser, developed at MGH, when shined on a tumour, could trigger a form of local inflammation that mimicked the presence of mutations, strongly enhancing immune attacks against non-mutated tumour proteins, thereby curing many mice of tumours that otherwise did not respond to immunotherapy," says Fisher.
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Concluding the research the study noted that applying a laser or other methods to optimize immune responses upon non-mutated targets on tumours.
This laser strategy may make immune checkpoint inhibitors effective against currently incurable cancers.