Safety switches that automatically stop the device for example before it overheats are built into many electrical appliances. Cells are also equipped with such "emergency stop" functions. They make sure that a defective cell doesn't become a tumor cell. A team from Technical University of Munich has now discovered such a switch in T cells. These results can help to find new therapies against T cell Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma triggered by defective immune cells.
Combination Immunotherapy Shown to Be Effective Initial Treatment for Relapsed Hodgkin Lymphoma
Newswise — For many people with classical Hodgkin lymphoma, the disease is one of the most curable forms of cancer with standard chemotherapy or chemo plus radiotherapy. But for the 10 to 30 percent of patients whose cancer relapses, or doesn’t respond to initial therapy, secondary treatment often involves harsher chemotherapies followed by an autologous stem cell transplant, which uses a patient’s own stem cells.
Now, researchers led by Alex Herrera, M.D., assistant professor in City of Hope’s Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation and a hematologist/oncologist, have found that a combination of two immunotherapy drugs — free of traditional chemotherapy — may be a more tolerable way for patients to fight the disease before a transplant.
"In our clinical trial, we studied a combination of two exciting new drugs — brentuximab vedotin and nivolumab — for treatment of relapsed or refractory Hodgkin lymphoma after the failure of frontline therapy and found that the combination was a safe, well-tolerated and highly effective bridge to transplantation,” said Herrera, who conducted the study with researchers from across the United States.