Sunday Times 2
Fight against cancer: Doctor with Lankan roots leads team in research breakthrough
View(s):NEW YORK – A team of investigators, led by Dr Niroshana Anandasabapathy, a physician of Sri Lankan parentage and an Assistant Professor of Dermatology at the Harvard Medical School, has discovered new insights into why the immune system fails to see cancer—even though “it hides in plain sight of the immune system”.
The body’s natural tumour surveillance programmes should be able to detect and attack rogue cancer cells when they arise, and yet when cancer thrives, it does so because these defence systems have failed, according to the study.
Described as a new frontier for cancer, and called immunotherapy, the investigators have uncovered a critical strategy that some cancers may be using to cloak themselves as they have found evidence of this genetic programme across 30 human cancers of the peripheral tissue, including melanoma skin cancer. Their results have been published in Cell, a medical research journal.
“Our study reveals a new immunotherapy target and provides an evolutionary basis for why the immune system may fail to detect cancers arising in tissues,” said Anandasabapathy. “The genetic programme we report on helps the immune system balance itself. Parts of this programme prevent the immune system from destroying healthy organs or tissues, but might also leave a blind spot for detecting and fighting cancer.”
Dr Anandasabapathy, the lead author, is an MD, Phd from the Stanford University Medical School, held a Dermatology Fellowship at the New York University Medical Center, researched in Immunology at the Rockefeller Institute and worked with the late Ralph Steinman – (who was awarded the Nobel prize for his work on the role of DENDRITIC cells in immunology).
Currently at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Dr Anandasabapathy is the daughter of Rani and Dr Indra Anandasabapathy, an anesthesiologist in Staten Island, New York, and who graduated from the Medical School in Colombo in 1967.