Malaria infection may be therapeutic for lung cancer

A group of scientists led by Prof. Xiaoping Chen at Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health (GIBH), Chinese Academy of Sciences in collaboration with Prof. Nanshan Zhong at Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Disease, Guangzhou Medical University recently discovered that malaria parasite infection significantly inhibited lung cancer growth and metastasis in mouse models and prolonged the survival of tumor-bearing mice. The researchers demonstrated that malaria infection provided anti-tumor effects by inducing both a potent anti-tumor innate immune response, including the secretion of IFN-γ and TNF-α and the activation of NK cells as well as adaptive anti-tumor immunity with increasing tumor-specific T-cell proliferation and cytolytic activity of CD8+ T cells. Notably, tumor-bearing mice infected with the parasite developed long-lasting and effective tumor-specific immunity.

Consequently,the searchers found that malaria parasite infection could enhance the immune response of lung cancer DNA vaccine and the combination produced a synergistic antitumor effect.These data suggest that malaria parasite infection may become an immunotherapy for lung cancer or malaria parasite may serve as a vector for lung cancer vaccine development.The results mentioned above have been recently published in the science journal, PLoS ONE.