NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The immune systems of ovarian cancer patients can produce antibodies against tumors, a cell-based study shows, and researchers suggest the finding could lead to a new type of immunotherapy.
"Patient-derived antibodies have diagnostic and therapeutic potential; yet, it remains unclear how antibodies gain autoreactivity and target tumors," Dr. Ziv Shulman of the Weizmann Institute of Science and colleagues write in Cell. "Here, we found that somatic hypermutations (SHMs) promote antibody antitumor reactivity against surface autoantigens in high-grade serous ovarian carcinoma (HGSOC)."
The team has generated 17 monoclonal antibodies that bind ovarian tumor cells, Dr. Shulman told Reuters Health by email. "The next step is to determine their specificity to the tumor cells and examine if they have therapeutic effects in mouse models," he said.
"The biggest challenge is to identify the targets of the antibodies we have generated," he noted. "We generated several antibodies based on sequences we obtained from patients. Each antibody has a target. We found 9 antibodies that bound the same tumor target (MMP14). And we have more antibodies but we do not know if any are binding on tumor cells.
In the current study, the team found that antibodies generated from immune cells within human ovarian carcinomas, as well as pre-existing autoantibodies, coat tumor cells - often with IgGs - and contribute to antitumor immune responses.
