Can radiation affect distant metastasis? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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If someone with cancer has initially responded to immunotherapy but then develops metastasis, radiation of the primary tumor may help treat those distant sites, research by Valsamo Anagnostou, a cancer researcher at Johns Hopkins, has shown.

Anagnostou: Radiation can activate immune responses in sites infiltrated by cancer cells but these are sites that are not directly irradiated. And this is what we call the abscopal effect of radiation, which is extremely hard to capture in human samples and this is what we did precisely with our study, where what we found was that there was this cold to hot conversion of the tumor microenvironment in cancer sites they called the metastatic sites that were not directly radiated.    :32

Anagnostou notes that radiation seems to induce more immune cells to infiltrate areas around the cancer, where such an immune response was absent beforehand. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.