Investigating immune function in long term cancer survivors
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Investigating immune function in long term cancer survivors
IRAS ID
266581
Contact name
Hardev Pandha
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Surrey
Duration of Study in the UK
3 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
A very unique group of cancer patients are long term survivors (> 5 years) of initially aggressive locally advanced or metastatic disease who have a complete response to their treatment (all scans clear) who then remain completely disease free without any further treatment.
Recent advances have allowed detailed evaluation of a patient's general immune function. Scientists believe that certain patients have proteins on their tumour surface which show strong similarity to viral or bacterial proteins, and this had a positive impact on their long term outcome and survival. In other words, in those patients, the cancer was possibly being regarded as an infection by the immune system and, as such, rapidly and efficiently ‘rejected’. We aim to look for this form of recognition and tumour rejection in the stored tumour tissue of long term cancer survivors, taken prior to treatment, and who went on to have complete elimination of their cancer, despite having a high disease burden initially. Further understanding and corroboration of this pathogen-like recognition would quickly influence new immune-based treatments for other patients.We will compare the long term survivors with control participants who will be healthy volunteers and also current cancer patients who we hypothesise won’t have these proteins which mimic bacterial/viral proteins on the surface of their tumours
Therefore a full evaluation of immune function in these long term survivor patients and controls will include blood-resident immune cells, , HLA tissue typing (Identifying which type of HLA proteins are present on their tissue – these proteins are responsible for regulating the immune system), an examination of their complete medical history and concurrent diseases, examination of their original cancer tissue (which will be stored in an archive in paraffin wax), an insight into the bacterial populations in the gut which can be determined using stool samples and also completion of a lifestyle questionnaire.REC name
North East - Tyne & Wear South Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
19/NE/0297
Date of REC Opinion
27 Sep 2019
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion