EditorPeople get cancer when these DNA repair mechanisms fail. Paul Modrich from Duke University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute discovered that people with mismatch repair defects are more at the risk of contracting cancer. Dr. Bert Vogelstein from Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Centre and Richard Kolodner of Hardvard Medical School (now at University of California, San Diego) did some subsequent work on this study and showed that such mismatch defects are the major cause behind most common of inherited cancer called the ‘colorectal cancer’. Also this is the major cancer causing factor in 15 percent of the cancer patients suffering from colorectal cancer.
These defects can now be a major help in predicting if a patient would benefit from the immunotherapies. This discovery holds the key to developing new drugs that work on our immune system to ward off cancer. Earlier this year one small study was published in new England journal of Medicine stating that 92 percent of the colon and rectal cancer patients having mismatch defects were benefitted from ‘Keytruda’ which is an immuno therapy developed by Merck & Co’s. This response was compared with the response of 16 percent of the same cancer patients not having this defect. There is a hope these findings might also be helpful to the patients with other types of cancer who have the same mismatch defects. In a telephonic interview Vogelstein said, “Mismatch repair defects are found not only in hereditary colorectal cancers. They are found in about 2 percent of cancer patients overall.” Pertaining to the fact that our immune system is capable of recognizing the foreign bodies, researchers from Hopkins believe that immune – booster drugs (BMY .N’s Opdivo, Keytruda etc.) will be a better option in the case of mutation loaded tumours. If this strategy could be extended to other cancers, Volgelstein said, “It could provide a very useful therapy for as many as one in 50 patients with cancer worldwide.”
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Editorial Staff
