By Nick Tate
Northeastern University immunologists have found that a new therapy that floods tumors with supplemental oxygenation can shrink them and dramatically improve the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy.
The findings — published in the journal Science Translational Medicine, founded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science — are being hailed as potential “breakthrough” that could dramatically increase the survival rate of patients with cancer, which kills some 8 million people each year.
“This discovery shifts the paradigm of decades-long drug development, a process with a low success rate,” said lead researcher Michail Sitkovsky, an immunophysiology expert at Northeastern. “Indeed, it is promising that our method could be implemented relatively quickly by testing in clinical trials the effects of oxygenation in combination with different types of already existing immunotherapies of cancer.”…