What Blocks Effects Of Newly Developed Anticancer Therapy?

A new approach being developed to treat individuals with cancer that is resistant to standard therapy is the use of adenovirus-based therapies. Although promising clinical results have been obtained in some settings, in many cases the therapies have had little impact.

One reason for this lack of efficacy has now been uncovered by a team of researchers, led by Nick Lemoine and Yahoe Wang, at Barts and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, London.

In the study, they found that human pancreatic cancer cell lines expressing the protein CEACAM6 were not sensitive to being killed by adenoviruses. Further analysis revealed the molecular mechanism by which CEACAM6 mediates its effects and indicated that knocking down expression of CEACAM6 markedly increased the anticancer effects of an adenovirus in mice harboring human tumor cells.

The authors therefore suggest that identifying whether or not a tumor expresses CEACAM6 and the downstream proteins required to block tumor cell killing by adenoviruses might provide a way to predict the response of patients to adenovirus-based therapies, and that these proteins might provide targets for the development of more effective adenovirus-based therapies.