Targeting the complement system to improve radiation response

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Our lab tries to understand how cancers exploit part of our immune system to their advantage. Our most recent work has focused on, the complement system, a part of the immune system that is best known for its role in helping fight infections. We have become very interested in this part of the immune system since cancer cells seem to hijack it for their own survival advantage. We are exploring the idea that cancer cells may be particularly dependent on these hijacked functions when exposed to external sources of damage, such as those used to kill the tumour during treatment. Our work indeed suggests that if we block certain parts of this system (with drugs) we may be able to make the cancer cell more likely to die following radiotherapy. Intriguingly, blocking certain parts of this system may also reduce the toxic effects of radiation in healthy gut. These findings therefore suggest that a drug against this system could reduce the side effects of radiation while also improving the effectiveness of radiotherapy on the tumour. We work to understand the details of how this works. The ultimate goal of these studies is to be able to use drugs against this system to improve radiotherapy in patients.