New cancer therapy strips away cancer’s sugar shield, boosts immune response

In a major breakthrough, scientists have discovered how to take away cancer's immune cells and allow your body to fight back, understanding the elimination of cancer like never before. 

MIT and Stanford scientists, in the study titled “Antibody-lectin chimeras for glyco-immune checkpoint blockade”, which published in ‘Nature’, have made a promising cancer breakthrough by uncovering how tumors hide from the immune system using a sugar shell on their surface. 

At the center of the work is a way to undo the built-in "brake" that tumors can trigger to keep immune cells from attacking. That brake is tied to sugars called glycans, which sit on the surface of cancer cells.

The scientists found that blocking these glycans with proteins known as lectins can greatly strengthen immune activity against cancer cells. To do this in a targeted way, they built multifunctional molecules called AbLecs that pair a lectin with an antibody that homes in on tumors.

They engineered new hybrid molecules, called AbLecs or Antibody-lectins, that attach to these sugar shields and block them, exposing cancer cells so immune cells to destroy them.

This approach effectively removes cancer’s disguise and supercharges the body’s own defenses in early tests, potentially making immunotherapy work for many more patients than current treatments do.