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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Newswise — A novel therapy that reprograms immune cells to promote antitumor activity helped shrink hard-to-treat prostate and bladder cancers in mice, according to research from the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center and its Bloomberg~Kimmel Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy and Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery . The study was published online May 3 in the journal Cancer Immunology Research , a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Immunotherapies that help the immune system recognize and fight tumors have revolutionized care for many types of cancer.

However, these therapies, which ramp up the production and activation of tumor cell-killing immune cells called T-cells, have not been effective in aggressive forms of prostate and bladder cancers. The field of oncology has been trying to find out why and how to make immunotherapies work better in these cancers, explains the study’s senior author, Jelani Zarif, Ph.D.



, Robert E. Meyerhoff Endowed Professor and associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins. Zarif and his colleagues suspected that immune cells called macrophages were to blame.

Under some conditions, macrophages help tumors grow and suppress T-cell activity, hampering the immune response to cancers. “The focus of our work is to reprogram the immune-suppressive tumor-associated macrophages into anticancer immune cells to enhance therapeutic responses to immunotherapies and other standard-of-care cancer therapies,” Zar.

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