Author：SIAIS
Date：16 March 2016
The Lerner Lab's totally new approach to Leukemia treatment has received a great deal of online attention after their study was published on October 20 last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Titled “Agonist antibody that induces human malignant cells to kill one another”, the article’s online impact up till present day has received a Altmetric score of 187 meaning it ranks in the top 5% of all research scored by Altmetric, and in the top 1% among tracked articles published in the same time period.
In this research the authors Professor Kyungmoo Yea and Professor Richard Lerner tested 20 of receptor-activating antibodies previously discovered in the lab against acute myeloid leukemia cells from human patients. They found an antibody against thrombopoietin (TPO) receptor which can convert acute myeloid leukemia cells into natural killer (NK) cells specifically and efficiently. The abstract has been downloaded 31105 times so far with the full-text being downloaded 658 times and the PDF 5070 times.
According to Medical News Today, the surprise finding, which involves changing leukemia cells into leukemia-killing immune cells, could lead to a powerful new therapy for leukemia and possibly other cancers as well. ReporterYvette Brazierwrote,“There are several advantages to such fratricidal therapies. First, if they are antibodies, they could be clinically useful with little or no further modification. Second, the likelihood of adverse side effects would be reduced, making them much more tolerable than existing chemotherapy. Finally, if every cancerous cell is potentially convertible to a cancer-killing NK cell, it might not just reduce the targeted cancer-cell population in a patient, but also it could potentially eliminate cancer altogether.”
