Professor Agi Grigoriadis
King’s College London
Awarded: £50,000
The challenge
Osteosarcoma is one of the most common types of primary bone cancer, mostly affecting children and young adults. Treatments have not significantly advanced for decades. Sadly, outcomes can be especially poor when the sarcoma has spread to the lungs. To develop better treatments, we need to understand how tumour cells spread and grow in the lungs.
How will this project tackle this challenge?
Recent cancer research focusses on boosting the immune system to attack cancer. Cancer cells can hijack key immune cells called TAMs, which can make chemotherapy less effective. By understanding the specific ways osteosarcoma cells do this, researchers can create a way to reverse it and kick-start the body’s own defence system, enhancing the effects of chemotherapy.
Previous research carried out by the project team has found that TAMs in osteosarcoma make a substance called Heme-Oxygenase-1 (HO-1), which stops the immune system from working. Excitingly, there is a drug which prevents this effect, called SnMP – which has already been used for neonatal jaundice. The team’s research has found that by blocking HO-1, SnMP might allow particular cells in the immune system to kill the tumour cells in the lungs, but they don’t know exactly how this works.
In this project, the team aim to understand how SnMP reactivates these immune cells. They will also explore whether combining SnMP with chemotherapy is a more effective treatment for osteosarcoma that has spread to the lungs.
What this means for people affected by sarcoma
This project will answer important questions about how osteosarcoma evades the immune system. It will also explore if you could target this process and develop an effective treatment when osteosarcoma has metastasised to the lungs. SnMP is already used for another disease. If it shows potential here, it could lead to clinical trials as a novel treatment for osteosarcoma patients.
