A more effective cancer treatment combines radiation therapy and stem cell therapy
An international team of scientists, led by the University of Granada (UGR) and involving professionals from the University Hospital Complex belonging to the Biosanitary Research Institute, institutions these also from Granada, have demonstrated the therapeutic potential of mesenchymal stem cells combined with radiotherapy in the fight against cancer.
These stem cells are able to lodge inside the tumor and, when activated by radiotherapy, secrete cytokines and tumor suppressor proteins, which produce a very significant improvement in the biological effect of ionizing radiation on tumors. The researchers demonstrated that this type of stem cells can serve as potentiating agents for the local and systemic effects of radiotherapy, that is, those that affect the irradiated tumor and the tumor cells located at a distance from the irradiated ones.
This discovery, published in the scientific journal Oncotarget, could serve to achieve a more effective radiotherapy and suggests that this could be, in addition to a successful local and regional treatment, also a new therapeutic modality in systemic cancer. Mesenchymal cells are a type of stem cells, present in a wide variety of tissues (bone marrow, blood and umbilical cord tissue, skin, fat or muscle tissue ...) and capable of producing different specialized cells found in the tissues of the body.
Reduced tumor growth
In this sense, researchers belonging to the Biomedical Research Center of the UGR, the Institute of Parasitology and Biomedicine (CSIC), the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and the San Cecilio de Granada University Hospital (CHUGR and ibs.GRANADA) studied the cellular sensitivity to the neighborhood or bystander effect (effect that occurs in cells close to those directly exposed to radiation), using for this a set of cancer cell lines and mesenchymal stem cells derived from umbilical cord stroma, including activation with radiation therapy.
The study is carried out on tumor models
implanted in mice and experimentally demonstrated that when radiotherapy is combined with treatment with mesenchymal cells both in irradiated tumors and in those located at a certain distance from the irradiated ones, the rate of tumor growth is reduced due to the decrease in the index tumor proliferation and increased death of neoplastic cells.