Researchers Find New Way To Track Cells That Kill Cancer [Study]

The study about cancer continues to flourish. A new promising cancer research from the University of Wisconsin paved the way for tracking cells that can kill cancer.

The researchers at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center tried to find another way to monitor the progress and success of cancer treatment practices following the flaws in immunotherapy, BadgeHerald reported.

According to Cancer.net, immunotherapy is the type of cancer treatment that uses the patient's natural immune system to battle cancer. It utilizes the materials produced by the body and improved in the laboratory to target and restore the immune system. It's not clear how this process treats cancer, but basically, it stops or slows down the growth of cancer cells and strengthens the immune system to work better at killing cancer cells.

In the new study, the team experimented with MRI techniques to track the "natural killer" cells and injected with fluorine-19, a non-radioactive naturally occurring isotope. Natural killer cells are essential in immunotherapy and they are five percent of one's peripheral blood.

"They basically go around the body and look for virally infected cells, and it's thought that they kill spontaneous development of cancer," Christian Capitini author of the study said.

The team used special MRI techniques to pickup fluorine-19. However, they need around 1,000 to 2,000 cells. Also, to make cells labeled with fluorine traceable with MRI they need 10,000 to 30,000 Sean Fain, study co-author said.

So, the team gathered human natural killer cells from regular blood and grew them in the lab to create a larger population. They incubate it with fluorine-19 and put it in a tube of cells with MRI spectrometer that are designed to detect fluorine atoms.

They tried it with a group of immune-deficient mice. First, they inject the killer cells directly into the tumor. In the second, they inject intravenously. They learned that direct injection is more successful.

However, this is the lesser preferred method because this process needs the tumor to be close to the surface and it is dangerous. For instance, injecting directly into the brain is risky.

"The use of imaging is pretty important to enable monitoring therapy and to establish whether certain approaches to immunotherapy are working better than others," Fain concluded. "I think everyone in the field of cancer imaging is racing right now to try and provide a means to image cell trafficking, but it's uncertain right now, which technique will be preferred and whether we'll get there."