When Dr. María Cristina Rodríguez Padilla first entered her laboratory at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, she observed a bleak panorama. He found it almost empty, with just a table and an ultra-low temperature freezer (-80 C). With her husband she began to set up an experimental practice. Today, he leads pioneering research in the world to cure cancer through immunotherapy. “We started with practically nothing.” Rodríguez explains to us. “Now we have a department with 10 research laboratories, 20 doctors of science, a small level 3 biosafety laboratory and a patient care area. We have published studies in journals of high international impact, in addition to research collaborations with other institutions, such as the Pasteur Institute, the Sorbonne, Harvard, MD Anderson, the University of Texas, the National Cancer Institute in Mexico, the University Hospital of the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, the National Polytechnic and private and public hospitals.”
Dr. Rodríguez works with peptides (short chains of amino acids connected by chemical bonds) that she produces in her laboratory. It has studied its effectiveness in eliminating breast cancer (the most common and deadly in Mexico) and also the so-called triple negative breast cancer, which is highly aggressive. In his research, he found that these peptides not only destroy cancer cells, but can also teach the body to fight them.
“The little pieces of cells that remain once the peptides have done their job can help the immune system recognize that tumor as foreign and destroy it with its own mechanisms (such as CD8-type T lymphocytes).” Dr. Rodríguez explains to us. “We want to activate these mechanisms specifically to eliminate the tumor through a form of cell death (or apoptosis) called immunogenic death. “We found the peptide that causes this type of death, which causes the patient’s body to give us an immune response and can destroy the rest of the tumor.”
Dr. Rodríguez’s laboratory verified the effectiveness of this peptide with mice. They injected them with tumor cells and, once the tumor had developed to a palpable level, they applied the supernatant of dead cancer cells in vitro. The tumor shrank and tumor growth was stopped. The research also has preventive applications so that the immune system does not develop tumors. By injecting healthy mice with this supernatant of dead cancer cells and then injecting the cancer cells, they found that tumors did not develop. With this treatment, then, you can not only combat an existing tumor, but also prevent future growth of a tumor.
“These works,” continues Dr. Rodríguez, “we did with our own peptides and with some that are now being synthesized, a derivative of prothrombin, a protein produced by the liver, with Dr. Jerzy Trojan from the Sorbonne in Paris. In the world of science we are already very close to finding a treatment that does not entail so many side effects, achieving an immune response to protect the patient against events that could occur in the future.” The most impressive thing about this research is that these peptides can be applied to many types of tumors. The results vary, of course, between different types of cancer. But it is a unique opportunity to develop immunological treatment. “With competitive results at the level of other countries more developed than us,” he concludes, “Mexico has the potential to do science at the level of the world’s leading powers.”
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