From the Independent:
For the past 20 years, the former academics who set up Immunocore have worked hard on realising their dream of developing a totally new approach to cancer treatment, and finally it looks as if their endeavours are beginning to pay off.
In the past three weeks, the company has signed contracts with two of the biggest players in the pharmaceuticals industry which could lead to hundreds of millions of pounds flowing into the firm's unique research on cancer immunotherapy – using the body's own immune system to fight tumour cells.
Immunocore is probably the only company in the world that has developed a way of harnessing the power of the immune system's natural-born killer cells: the T-cells of the blood which nature has designed over millions of years of evolution to seek out and kill invading pathogens, such as viruses and bacteria.
T-cells are not nearly as good at finding and killing cancer cells, but the hard-nosed executives of the drugs industry – who are notoriously cautious when it comes to investments – believe Immunocore may have found a way around this so that cancer patients in future are able to fend off their disease with their own immune defences.
"Immunotherapy is radically different," said Bent Jakobsen, the Danish-born chief scientific officer of Immunocore who started to study T-cells 20 years ago while working at the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. "It doesn't do away with the other cancer treatments by any means, but it adds something to the arsenal that has one unique feature – it may have the potency to actually cure cancer,"
No comments:
Post a Comment