Researchers offering hope for liver cancer patients

Immunotherapy works by helping the body’s immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells.

Professor Mann said: “At the present time, the prognosis for liver cancer that’s caught late isn’t good.

“Immunotherapy can be successful for these patients, but it doesn’t work as well as we would like and unfortunately it doesn’t work for everyone.

“The end result of this grant, and our research, is to try to improve that situation and for more patients to have better results.

“It’s about enabling these patients to live with their cancer but such that they live better and longer with it.”

The Newcastle researchers, who work in collaboration with a team at the Cancer Research UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow headed by Professor Owen Sansom, have already discovered that white blood cells called neutrophils can be harnessed to attack liver cancer tumours.

Immunotherapy is the most effective treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma or HCC, a type of liver cancer which can develop when a patient has liver disease, including those caused by viral infections or fatty liver diseases. It’s more common in people who are overweight or have type 2 diabetes.

However, immunotherapy is still only effective for a minority of patients and may be less effective in patients who have an HCC with a background of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Pre-clinical studies have indicated that a drug, called AZD5069, which was originally developed for the treatment of asthma, could make tumours more sensitive to immunotherapy.

AZD5069 is currently going through clinical trials to discover if it could help more patients to benefit from immunotherapy treatment.

The grant will enable the team to build on the initial discovery to learn precisely how neutrophils stimulate immunotherapy.

In the process the team hopes to discover new immunotherapies that could be effective for more patients with HCC.