An in-depth picture of the tumour environment

What you need to know

• Prostate cancers are often resistant to treatments that work by activating the immune system. We don’t fully understand why, but it may be due to the environment around the tumour.
• Dr Mark Linch and his colleagues will use prostate cancer samples collected from men as part of a previous study to look in detail at the molecular makeup of the cancer and surrounding environment.
• This will help them find new ways of triggering the immune system to fight prostate cancer and select which men are most likely to benefit from this type of treatment.

To get the immune system to attack prostate cancer, we must first understand how the cancer can silence an immune response. The cancer is surrounded by a complex soup of proteins and small molecules that can influence how the immune system responds. Dr Mark Linch and his colleagues want to use advanced techniques to get a detailed picture of what is happening.

Immunotherapy promise

Treatments that use the body’s immune system to fight cancer, known as immunotherapies, have had only limited success in treating advanced prostate cancer. To find out why, we need to understand the immune cells in and around the cancer. This will help us find out what is stopping the immune system from attacking the cancer, and identify which patients may benefit most from immunotherapy.

Making the most of existing samples

The team previously carried out a study called PROGENY, which examined the genetic differences between prostate cancer samples from 49 men. This revealed that, in most cases, the immune cells needed to attack the cancer were either missing or had been deactivated.

Now they want to study these samples in much greater depth to reveal the environment around the tumour and understand how this influences the immune cells. The team can then compare the findings against what happened with the men over the following five years.

Advanced techniques

Using a technique known as mass cytometry, the team will be able to identify up to 40 different proteins in each slice of tissue. This will help them understand precise differences between the samples and how they correspond with how that cancer behaved in real life.

Chemical tags attached to DNA, in a process known as methylation, has previously been linked to the immune response in tumours. The team will look for these tags in the samples to see if this holds true for prostate cancer.

Combined, this will provide a large amount of data on prostate immune cells and may help to find avenues of research for creating new treatments.

Grant information

Reference – MA-IMM19-013

Researcher – Dr Mark Linch

Institution – University College London

Award - £331,999