Though many research institutions have a common goal of finding new ways to treat or even cure cancer, the pathways to that goal are often diverse.

One new study coming out of a La Jolla lab — in collaboration with other local labs — is looking at the immune system as one potential path to new treatment options.

Currently, cancer treatments largely include chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. But “the fact that our body is naturally capable of killing cancer cells means the immune system can do this if we can redirect that efficiently,” said Amir Ferry, a postdoctoral researcher in the Goldrath Lab at UC San Diego.

“A lot of people are interested in the immune system [because] we are learning that it is not just involved in attacking viruses or causing allergies. It does basically anything, Ferry said. The immune system is really involved in aging, cardiovascular disease, wound healing, neurodegeneration and to me, that is an exciting field to be in.

“If we can tinker with the immune system properly, we can address a lot of these very diverse types of diseases.”

Chief among them, he said, is cancer.

“In our lab, we study this fundamental process called immune memory, which is the ability of the immune system to know it is re-encountering something it saw in its past and is able to respond much more quickly to that and clear a pathogen from the body,” Ferry said. “That basic tenant is what vaccines rely on, but there are still some mysteries as to how immune memory works.”

Thus, the labs work focuses on immune memory and T-cells — white blood cells that play a role in fighting cancer. Specifically, its looking at the rules that govern the process of T-cell memory, how to leverage T-cells’ capacity to attack cancer and how to redirect their ability to kill tumors.

To gain better understanding of how T-cells work and communicate, the lab took a new approach to studying them.

For many years, Ferry said, scientists who studied T-cells would rely on blood or lymphatic system samples to give a snapshot of how the immune system was operating. But more recently, scientists have learned that “most of the immune cell activity isn’t happening in the blood, its happening in the tissue. So if you take a T-cell from the tissue from the lung or the intestines, it will behave differently than the T-cell in the blood. So we are starting to characterize how these tissue-resident T-cells function.

When you look at clinical studies, patients whose T-cells look like tissue-resident T-cells tend to do better, Ferry added. So we are trying to understand what makes a tissue-resident T-cell better, why it performs better against tumors and how we can use that knowledge to improve the efficacy of immunotherapy.”

As part of that effort, the team discovered a new pathway that tissue-resident T-cells use that enables them to survive more efficiently.

“This process, known as uncovering a new signaling access, looks at how these T-cells communicate with other immune cells,” Ferry said. “We showed that if you can control the signaling pathway artificially, you can boost T-cell function within tumors.”

The study, authored by Ferry and his team along with scientists at La Jollas Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, will be published in coming months.

The goal, Ferry said, is to come up with the next wave of immunotherapy.

“A big problem with immunotherapy as it stands today is that it is not effective in all types of cancers,” he said. “It works pretty well in melanoma, but in something like pancreatic cancer, it doesnt work as well because those tumors are [what is known as] immunologically cold, which means there is not a lot of immune cell activity in those tumors.

Our study allows us to potentially turn cold tumors into hot tumors. If you do that … it is much more likely to respond to classic immunotherapies. So that has been a huge effort that has been going on across immuno-oncology … how can we create an environment within the patient’s immune system that allows it to respond to a tumor that it normally wont respond to?”

The signaling access the study uncovered, he said, “has the potential to transform some of these tumors into immunologically hot environments.”

Ferry said this type of research “drew me to immunology in the first place. I saw so many potential avenues to apply discoveries.”

Those who laid the foundation in the field “weren’t necessarily interested in developing new oncology treatments … they were asking really fundamental questions about how T-cells work and how these cells actually kill cells, he said. By asking those fundamental questions … we have been able to merge what we see in textbooks with … studying the immune system and taking those discoveries and translating them.”

Two papers published last year by La Jolla-based researchers aimed to bolster T-cells.

One from a team led by UCSD postdoc Miguel Reina-Campos discussed how memory T-cells that live in human tissue respond to cholesterol. The team found that cells are affected by the presence of dietary cholesterol, shutting down key internal cellular machinery used to help T-cells function.

By manipulating that machinery, researchers were able to trigger the production of an antioxidant crucial to unlocking energy stores inside cells.

The findings, Reina-Campos said, suggest it is possible to make T-cells able to fight longer.

Another paper, by a team led by Stephen Schoenberger of the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, described a new way to design cancer vaccines that can activate two different classes of T-cells — CD8 cells capable of hunting down and destroying tumors and helper CD4 cells.

Having both engaged simultaneously, Schoenberger said, helps broaden the targeting by CD8 cells, making hits more likely.

Its harder for a tumor to evade a collection of guided missiles than it is a single specificity, he said.

The labs involved in the new study plan to follow up on some of their findings and ask more questions with the hope of turning it all into clinical practice.

“We’re working toward that and engaging with some of the local [research labs] to see if we can translate this, Ferry said. We think this is compelling biology that is worthy of being investigated in a more business-oriented manner.”

— San Diego Union-Tribune staff writer Paul Sisson contributed to this report.