Testing new treatments for thyroid cancer

A team of researchers at the ICR are focusing their efforts on testing novel immunotherapies that could improve treatment in these patients.

Immunotherapies utilise the specificity and power of the body’s immune system to target and destroy cancer cells. Their research focuses on identifying which molecules and cells in the immune system are best to target in order to increase the ability of the immune system to fight cancer.

Drugs that directly activate STING, a pathway thought to be triggered by radiotherapy, that leads the immune system to attack cancer cells, are now being developed as a new class of cancer therapeutics.

As radiotherapy is not commonly used to treat thyroid cancer, this direct drug activation of STING may be a novel approach, capable of mimicking the signalling triggered by radiotherapy. Dr Pederson will investigate this pathway using drugs that activate it and how these could be combined with other immunotherapies to ultimately reduce tumour growth.

STING pathway activation has already so to have a major impact is some thyroid cancer patients. In one case, a patient with an aggressive disease which has an average survival time of around 6 weeks, was treated with a drug that activates this pathway and his tumour all but disappeared within 9 months.

By understanding how this pathway works, the team hopes to be able to come up with a more effective combination treatment that switches on the immune system attack against cancer cells and therefore reduces tumour growth.