When it comes to getting lung cancer, natural killer cells may determine how susceptible you are to the disease, scientists at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis discovered.
They came to their finding looking at three groups of mice that had different degrees of risk of getting lung tumors. Exposure to a lung cancer-causing carcinogen caused one group to get lung cancer, oddly enough, while another group only generated moderate tumors. A third barely had any tumors at all. But after depleting natural killer cells from the mice using an antibody, the rodents that hadn't had any tumors began to develop large, particularly nasty ones, the researchers say.
Even more interesting, for the mice that were vulnerable to getting lung cancer anyway, a bone marrow transplant helped block development of the disease, as it manipulated the immune system.
What the scientists believe is that natural killer immune cells, rather than T cells or cells governing inflammation, can help block the advance of lung cancer. It would be a powerful tool if proven to be true in human trials. While years away from human testing, the idea offers a provocative approach toward addressing lung cancer, which can be extremely hard to treat and quite random. Heavy smokers often don't get the disease, the researchers note, but many who never smoke end up getting lung cancer.
Identifying a genetic approach to fighting the disease in people would be a huge advance in lung cancer treatment. While this is years away, the researchers are moving forward. They are now studying the blood of heavy smokers and nonsmokers both with and without lung cancer to explore any possible clues in genetic variation. While T cells destroy tumor cells in other cancers, they may be disabled in lung cancer. And so the finding gives hope that natural killer cells can offer a viable treatment.
For details, read more about the study in the journal Cancer Research.
- read the release
- here's the journal abstract