Children’s Cancer Institute
Dr Orazio Vittorio and his team from Children’s Cancer Institute in Sydney have discovered that removing copper from the blood can destroy some of the deadliest cancers that are resistant to immunotherapy.
Whilst immunotherapy, a treatment that works through a patient’s immune system to kill the cancers has been extremely successful with many cancer patients, some cancers camouflage themselves from current immunotherapies. It is known that cancer cells, such as brain cancer ‘feed’ on copper, often having up to six times the normal levels of the metal inside the tumour cells.
Dr Vittorio and his colleagues studied 90 children with neuroblastoma and another 90 with gliomas. Both cancers have high mortality rates and to date have not responded well to cancer immunotherapy. A drug, TETA, used in the treatment of excess copper storage in the body was tested in animal models and was shown to significantly reduce the size of their tumours.
‘Given that TETA is already in use in a number of clinical conditions and it is inexpensive and easy to manufacture, this may offer a viable treatment alternative for those cancers that are resistant to current immunotherapies’.
