Hopes high for Japan's new cancer research

Main Category: Cancer / Oncology
Article Date: 29 Apr 2004 - 0:00 PDT


The Education, Science and Technology Ministry, Japan, established a project team earlier this month to develop a new immune therapy for cancer that is expected to have few side effects, based on preliminary research.

Other types of therapy for cancer include surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

The ministry will welcome input on promising therapies from researchers across the country and will run the research project for five years.

In order to link the results of the research to treatment, the Kobe-based Translational Research Informatics Center will be responsible for mapping out treatment plans and determining the effectiveness of proposed therapies.

Improving treatment by putting basic research into practical use is one of the pillars of the government's third 10-year anticancer strategy that began this month.

Immunity stops cancer, which can occur even in healthy people, from developing. Cancer may grow if it spreads through the immune system.

When a tumor develops, a substance is excreted that suppresses immunity.

The immune therapy aims to increase a patient's immunity to cancer by hundreds of times and is believed to have much fewer side effects than anticancer drugs.

According to a recent survey conducted by Toshitada Takahashi, chairman of the Society for Fundamental Cancer Immunology and head of the Aichi Cancer Center Research Institute, at least 60 research projects are being carried out or are being planned by 18 groups in the country, in addition to the ministry's project.

All members of the society are researchers.

Interest in immune therapy has emerged before, but with the rapid development of life sciences, the current research has generated higher expectations of success.

Hiro Wakasugi, head of the National Cancer Center's Pharmacology Division, said that since the structure of the immune system has been unveiled at the molecular level, the drive to conduct research based on scientific evidence has been accelerating.

Two therapies currently being clinically studied--a customized vaccine treatment by Kurume University Prof. Kyogo Ito and his team and a natural killer T (NKT) cell therapy by a team led by Masaru Taniguchi, head of the Riken Research Center for Allergy and Immunology--have gained attention.

Ito and his team have created vaccines from cancer antigens taken from cancer cells and administered several types of customized vaccines to patients whose immunities react to such vaccines. It has tried customized vaccines on more than 300 patients suffering from various types of cancer.

The team has applied to the government for full-fledged clinical trial on a vaccine for a kind of prostate cancer on which hormone therapy has no effect.

Tani and his team have discovered a new immune cell, an NKT cell, that has strong cancer-destroying properties and substances that can activate the NKT cell.

Tani and a Chiba University Hospital team led by director Takehiko Fujisawa are conducting clinical research on preventing a recurrence of lung cancer and have high hopes the therapy will be effective on a variety of cancers.

In preparation for clinical application, Takahashi and his team are attempting to develop a therapy to prevent a recurrence of leukemia by using research results of bone marrow transplantation.

Cancer is ideally cured with one's immune system, but immune therapy also has its limits.

"It's impossible to get rid of a tumor with immune therapy alone," Tani said.

Immune therapy may prevent recurrence, including secondary cancer, and destroy cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.

An estimated 3 million people in Japan have suffered from cancer.

With the victim's biggest worry being the recurrence and spread of the disease, an effective preventive therapy would be significant.

The envisioned therapy can be carried out in parallel with surgery or anticancer drugs with few side effects.

Private clinics currently are carrying out various immune therapies.

Some types of mushrooms believed to be effective in fighting cancer are on the market, but to distinguish effective drugs from the wide range of medical products is difficult.

Against this backdrop, the Society for Fundamental Cancer Immunology is looking into posting its research and treatment methods on the Internet.

"We hope this would help people understand the difference between therapies with and those without scientific evidence on their effect," Takahashi said.

With its immunology ahead of many other countries, Japan is expected to develop an effective immune therapy.

Source: http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/main/main-e.htm

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