Dr. Michael Har-Noy, founder and CEO of Immunovative Therapies Ltd., a biotech company in Israel, says that harnessing the human immune system for effective cancer therapy has remained elusive to date in modern medical practice. The major limiting factor seems to be the cancer’s ability to avoid an attack by the patient’s immune system. Although tumors frequently elicit a strong immune response during their early growth, the immune response that is elicited is often suppressed by the tumor. Dr. Michael Har-Noy states that attempts to educate the patient’s immune response through cancer vaccines fail to stimulate anti-tumor immunity because they can’t overcome this ability of the tumor to suppress the immune response.A person’s immune system is designed to destroy foreign proteins. However, says Dr. Michael Har-Noy, in the case of a normal pregnancy, the fetus is foreign to the mother, yet the mother’s immune cells do not destroy the fetus as they circulate in the fetal tissue. Dr. Michael Har-Noy says that the placenta sends out chemical signals which disable the immune cells that are programmed to kill foreign tissue. This is a completely natural immunosuppression mechanism.
Dr. Michael Har-Noy goes on to point out that cancers emit similar immunosuppressive chemical signals as those produced by a placenta. These chemicals neutralize attacks against the tumor, thereby allowing the tumor to grow unaffected by the patient’s immune system. This is the primary reason why cancer vaccines which attempt to educate the patient’s tumor-killing immune cells fail to eliminate the disease.
When immune and foreign cells mix, the array of chemicals that are released have the power to disable the immunosuppressive signals produced by tumors as well as a normal placenta. Dr. Michael Har-Noy indicates that this is why a transplanted immune system is so effective in eradicating a cancer. However, an immune system transplanted into a patient frequently attacks the patient’s normal tissues as well, creating a deadly side effect known as graft-versus-host disease (GVHD).
At Immunovative Therapies, Dr. Michael Har-Noy and his team have harnessed an immune response they have termed the Mirror EffectTM. The Mirror EffectTM stimulates a patient’s own immune system to attack foreign cancer cells. This response causes none of the toxicity of GVHD. Results of a preliminary Phase I/II trial suggest that Immunovative Therapies’ unique biologic compounds have anti-tumor activity against a wide variety of cancers and may, in the future, provide patients with curative immunity.