A research team led by Prof. Chunwan Lv from the School of Life Sciences developed a novel immunotherapeutic agent for treating colorectal cancer.

This agent, upon successful entry into tumor cells, can significantly enhance the function of cytotoxic T lymphocytes to kill tumor cells. It will help restore the vitality of the immune system and inhibit the progression of colorectal tumors.

Colorectal cancer, characterized by its long latency period and high mortality rate, poses a severe threat to human health. Among various therapeutic strategies , immunotherapy is considered one of the most promising treatment directions. Its principle is to apply immunological methods to enhance the immunogenicity of tumor cells and the ability of immune cells to kill tumor cells, thereby stimulating and enhancing the host anti-tumor immune response. Immunotherapy usually includes infusing immune cells into the cancer patients so it can work with the immune system to kill tumors and inhibit tumor growth. Currently, immunotherapy has become a new hot spot in cancer research field.

According to the animal experiments performed by Prof. Lv’s team, the novel immunotherapeutic agent they developed not only enhances the immunogenicity of tumor cells but also significantly improves the lytic function of cytotoxic T lymphocytes against tumor cells in mice. More importantly, it has showed no significant toxicity to normal cells. In this way, the agent provides a new approach for treating colorectal cancer and might be a blessing to colorectal cancer patients.

"The cutting-edge advantage of our agent lies mainly in its reduced toxicity. We will explore toxicity data in the next phase of our research," said Professor Lv, adding that the team will focus on translating the agent to clinical trials in future.

The related findings were published in the academic journal "ACS Nano".

By Qu Mingfeng

Editor: Eva Yin