17/03/2026
A research grant has been awarded to Dr Sam Au at Imperial College London, to engineer a pioneering laboratory tool which might ultimately identify safer, more effective and more targeted treatment options for Ewing sarcoma patients in the future.
It is already known that many Ewing sarcoma cancer cells have a protein on their surface called STEAP1. This is an example of a target being used to develop new treatments, where a patient’s own immune system fights the cancer using ‘bispecific antibodies’. These bispecific antibodies will bind to not only the target protein on cancer cells, but also to immune cells, attacking the cancer cells. However, these treatments, called immunotherapy, can cause serious side effects.
The laboratory tool being engineered in this research, called a ‘microfluidic avidity platform’, will allow researchers to test how strongly immune cells bind to tumour cells, testing several different bispecific antibodies in laboratory models, to see which work best against Ewing sarcoma cells and which are the safest.
It is hoped that the tool will speed up the discovery of safer immunotherapy treatments while also helping to improve survival rates and quality of life for patients.
Read more: https://ow.ly/4r4s50YvomM
