This novel therapy slowed the growth in 93 percent of mice with prostate cancer, and 53 percent of mice with pancreatic cancer.

Promising results in mice may one day lead to a new way to treat prostate cancer.

Scientist Alan Friedman, M.D., in collaboration with Kenneth Pienta, M.D., the Donald S. Coffey Professor of Urology, Lei Zheng, M.D., Ph.D., and Elizabeth Jaffee, M.D., of the Johns Hopkins Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center, has developed a novel cell-based therapy that slowed the growth in 93 percent of mice with prostate cancer, and 53 percent of mice with pancreatic cancer.

This work, published in the Journal for Immunotherapy of Cancer, “builds on the finding that several cancers grow slower in mice that lack a protein called p50 in myeloid cells, a type of white blood cell,” says Friedman. When mice with cancer were given engineered white blood cells that lack p50, “this activated cells in the immune system to attack the cancer,” which curtailed cancer’s ability to grow and spread.

Friedman’s laboratory is now working to develop human immature myeloid cells lacking p50 – looking at prostate cancer patients’ blood or bone marrow cells, and also at patient-derived adult stem cells – as a new form of immunotherapy.