Discoveries
Knocking out cancer's 'bodyguard' may work against Hodgkin lymphoma, investigators find
Jing Ouyang (left) and Przemyslaw Juszczynski tracked down active Hodgkin genes.
When a person develops Hodgkin lymphoma, his or her immune system rallies to attack the tumors with special seek-and-destroy white blood cells. In a typical Hodgkin tumor, this "army" of white cells vastly outnumbers the cancer cells. The problem is, they're largely ineffective. It's almost as if the tumor is protected by its own biologic bodyguard. That is exactly what a team led by Dana-Farber's Margaret Shipp, MD, found in a recent study, and the discovery could lead to a new treatment strategy for the disease, which mainly strikes young adults and causes more than 1,000 deaths annually in the United States. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The "bodyguard" came to light when Przemyslaw Juszczynski, MD, PhD, Jing Ouyang, PhD, and others in the Shipp group hunted for likely candidates in Hodgkin cells. They homed in on one gene, Gal 1, that makes a protein called Galectin 1. The researchers showed that the protein could kill the immune cells assigned to eliminate the tumor.
Could Gal 1 be silenced in human patients as a way to rev up the immune system's attack on Hodgkin tumors? "We're excited about this treatment lead," says Shipp. "We are currently generating antibodies that can neutralize the 'bodyguard' protein – and we'd like to fast-track this experimental therapy into clinical trials."