A group at Kyushu University's Graduate School of Engineering has proposed a new cancer treatment method that utilizes the body's ability to eliminate foreign substances and allows the body to treat cancer by itself.
What he has developed is the cell medicine “MacTrigger,” which induces strong inflammation only in cancer. MacTrigger is a genetically modified immune cell macrophage that utilizes the property of macrophages to actively accumulate in cancer.Macrophages accumulated in cancer cells are known to polarize from the normal type (MO type) to the anti-inflammatory type (M2 type). programmed to do so.
When MacTrigger is injected into cancer-bearing mice, MacTrigger efficiently reaches the cancer and becomes a "trigger" that causes strong inflammation.Then, the body's innate ability to "exclude foreign substances" comes into play, and immune cells such as natural killer (NK) cells and killer T cells invade cancer that has become inflamed due to MacTrigger.In this way, the body's own attempt to eliminate cancer effectively suppresses the growth of cancer, confirming its anti-cancer effect.
MacTrigger is a cell medicine based on a new concept of "providing the body with the opportunity to treat cancer", which is completely different from conventional therapeutic drugs that "kill cancer".Since it is the body itself that treats cancer, no major side effects have been observed in experiments with mice.Even if MacTrigger accumulates in healthy organs other than cancer, the risk of side effects is minimized because it does not polarize to the M2 type and does not cause inflammation. It is equipped with a "lock function" that does not operate as a Trigger unless it is the M2 type, so you can administer with confidence.
In the future, we plan to maximize the effect and ensure further safety for the clinical application of MacTrigger.
