Investigating how a protein called Tspan6 affects immune cells in breast cancer

Breast cancer cells can find ways to hide from our immune system so they can survive. Immunotherapies are drugs that help the immune system to recognise and attack cancer cells. But not all tumours respond well to this treatment. We therefore need to find new ways to improve the effectiveness of immunotherapies so that more people can benefit from them. 

Professor Fedor Berditchevski of the University of Birmingham and his colleagues previously found that breast cancer cells have lower levels of a protein called Tspan6. Sometimes this protein is missing completely.

Tspan6 can help immune cells gather inside tumours to clear them. And lower levels of Tspan6 and immune cells found within tumours are linked to worse outcomes in breast cancer.

So, Fedor wants to understand how this protein can influence the immune system. The researchers already know that it affects immune cells called B cells and how they interact with other parts of the immune system.

Now, he’s using breast cancer cells grown in the lab and mouse models of the disease to study how those changed B cells impact other immune cells that are needed for the body to mount an immune response against the tumour. His team is trying to better understand how they influence the function of immune cells called T cells. In particular, the ability of T cells to reach and assemble inside the tumour and destroy breast cancer cells.

This project will give us new insight into the complex ways that breast cancer cells communicate with and hide from the immune system. This knowledge could help in the design of potential new drugs to disrupt these communications. This could help immune cells to more effectively recognise and destroy breast cancer.

Around 55,000 people are diagnosed with breast cancer each year in the UK. This project could help people with all types of breast cancer, by bringing new effective treatments.