Dr Jun Ishihara
Imperial College London
Awarded: £60,000
The challenge
Osteosarcoma is the most common type of bone cancer, usually affecting young people. The standard treatment includes surgery, chemotherapy, and sometimes radiotherapy. However, these treatments often don’t work well when the cancer has spread to other parts of the body, such as the lungs or other bones.
Even after treatment, the cancer can come back, and many patients do not respond well to the therapies available. A promising new area of treatment is immunotherapy, which uses the body’s own immune system to fight cancer. However, a type of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint inhibitors has not worked well for most osteosarcoma patients.
How will this project tackle this challenge?
The team is developing a new type of immunotherapy that aims to be more effective and cause fewer side effects. This therapy focuses on a protein called collagen, which is found in large amounts inside osteosarcoma tumours, but in very low levels in healthy tissues. This makes it a good potential target for therapies.
The new treatment uses a special antibody that can find and attach to a rare collagen within tumours. Early results have shown that the drug can successfully reach and bind to osteosarcoma tumours in mice, and that it also binds to tumour tissue taken from patients.
The next step will be to test whether this antibody can target and reach tumours that have spread to the lungs and bones using mouse and human osteosarcoma cells. The researchers will attach a powerful cancer-fighting immune molecule to this antibody, allowing it to deliver the therapy directly to the cancer, avoiding healthy parts of the body. They will test this new treatment in lab and animal models to see how well it works and to check for side effects.
What this means for people affected by sarcoma
This project introduces a new and highly targeted approach to treating osteosarcoma, especially in cases where the cancer has spread. If successful, this work could lead to clinical trials and in the future a potential new immunotherapy for osteosarcoma. It also opens a new area of research that could benefit people with other types of sarcoma in the future.
