Real estate broker Peter R. Friedman is the chairman of Friedman Equities, LLC, in New York. Outside of his real estate development career, Peter R. Friedman supports medical research and is on the advisory board of Weizmann Institute of Science.
Recently, faculty from Weizmann Institute completed a study that showed it is possible for immune cells to identify, target, and destroy melanoma cancer cells more effectively. The research added to developments in the field of immunotherapy and its applications in cancer treatment.
Immunotherapy in cancer treatment involves the injection of antibodies that power up the body’s T cells to identify and destroy cancer cells. The T cells identify cancer cells through certain physical markers that betray them as foreign bodies. These physical markers include mutated peptides on the surface of cancer cells called neo-antigens.
With melanoma, however, the neo-antigens on cancer membranes are comprised of a protein complex known as HLA, which comes in thousands of variations. The multiple variations makes it hard to use neo-antigen detection as the basis of developing an immunotherapy drug for melanoma.
Thankfully, the study led by Weizmann Institute’s Professor Yardena Samuels indicated a more effective way of identifying neo-antigens on melanoma cells. The study, which was published in the journal Cancer Discovery, also revealed the T cells best suited to destroy these neo-antigens. In the study, the researchers’ neo-antigen and T cell detection strategy was so good that their neo-antigenic specific T cells destroyed 90 percent of targeted melanoma cells in mice.
