University of Pennsylvania

01/17/2025 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 01/17/2025 10:21

Developing a tiny anticancer weapon

A new twist on a decades-old anticancer strategy has shown powerful effects against multiple cancer types in a preclinical study from researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine. The experimental approach, which uses tiny capsules called small extracellular vesicles (sEVs), could offer an innovative new type of immunotherapy treatment and is poised to move toward more advanced development and testing.

Image: iStock/Bahaa_Aladdin

Published in Science Advances, the researchers describe how they used sEVs, which are engineered in the lab from human cells, to target a cell-surface receptor called DR5 (death receptor 5) that many tumor cells have. When activated, DR5 can trigger the death of these cells by a self-destruct process called apoptosis. Researchers have been trying for more than 20 years to develop successful DR5-targeting cancer treatments. The new approach, using engineered sEVs to target DR5, outperformed DR5-targeting antibodies, which have been considered a leading DR5-targeting strategy. The sEVs were efficient killers of multiple cancer cell types in lab-dish tests, and blocked tumor growth in mouse models, enabling much longer survival than DR5-targeting antibodies.

"This new strategy has a number of advantages compared to previous DR5-targeting strategies and other anticancer immunotherapies, and after these encouraging preclinical results, we're developing it further for human clinical trials," says senior author Xiaowei "George" Xu, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, and member of the Tara Miller Melanoma Centerin Penn Medicine's Abramson Cancer Center. "We've seen that many patients have benefited from advances in cancer immunotherapy but know there's more to work to do. This is our motivation for seeking new strategies for cellular therapies, particularly in solid tumor cancers, like melanoma, where current immunotherapies only work for about half of patients."

Xu notes that sEVs can be manufactured and stored relatively easily, making them a potential "off-the-shelf" therapy that could be given to any patient and would not require retrieving cells from each patient, as is the case with other personalized cellular therapies.

Read more at Penn Medicine News.