Tumor-derived erythropoietin acts as immunosuppressive switch in cancer immunity
13 comments
·April 25, 2025hinkley
Kalanos
You're right, DNA damage is just one of the types of genetic variation in cancer. There are many other structural variations that act like remixes.
"Maybe we need to start culturing and DNA testing cancers." I assure you this is being done at a massive scale.
Due to cellular stress, cancer cells disobey multi-cellular governance. They behave more like independent organisms fighting for survival, reverting to primal programming.
hinkley
Oh I know we are trying to genomically test them for oncology research and potential treatment plans, but do they do paternity tests on them?
I was trying to remember which mammal in Australia gets tumors from fighting, and I found a reference to a mother getting melanoma from her daughter. It’s unclear to me whether the cancer transmission was rare or the identification is rare.
rflrob
There’s very often a comparison to the somatic (i.e. non-cancer) genome of the same patient. It’s a great way to quality control that there wasn’t some sample mixup in the lab.
Transmission of cancer is rare in humans—if it were not, it would make someone’s career to find many cases of it. While we can’t say that all sheep are white, we’ve looked at enough of them to say that black sheep are not common. Furthermore, it’s very clear how the Tasmanian devil cancer is spread—it’s around the mouth while they are biting each others faces; it’s not as obvious how one would spread most human cancers.
superfist
The cancer problem always struck me as more of a control theory challenge than a purely biological one.
giantg2
They do genetically sequence cancers today, at least looking for specific markers.
atombender
> ulcers are bacter
To be clear, some peptic ulcers are caused by H. pylori, but not all ulcers.
w10-1
It would be nice to see the original article.
But at face value this looks very promising.
This identifies one way solid tumors avoid immune attack and identifies corresponding therapeutic targets that could span solid tumor types.
EPO (erythropoietin) (aside from stimulating red-blood-cell production) also converts tumor-local macrophages from attacking to suppressing immune attacks. Tumors are shown to produce EPO themselves.
Tumors spontaneously regressed due to revived immune response when blocking either EPO or the EPO receptor on the macrophages.
The model was murine liver cancer, but high blood EPO levels are known to be poor prognosticators in many solid tumor cancers.
This summary points to NRF2 (nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2) as a regulatory target, but without any detail.
AFAICT there are no approved drugs blocking EPO receptors and no drugs to reduce EPO; there are some anti-anemia drugs that increase production.
badmonster
yeah i cannot read the full article
SimplyUnknown
Full paper link for the interested: https://ehdijrb3629whdb.tiiny.site
mariusor
Let me guess, this research was sponsored by Lance Armstrong?
hinkley
Huh. I assumed this was going to be a collision of acronyms but erythropoietin is the same EPO used medicinally to treat anemia and abused by several generations of endurance athletes (complications include strokes and heart attacks from blood clot).
It’s a stress-signaling hormone produced by the kidneys when they detect hypoxia and triggers more red blood cell production in bone marrow.
mariusor
What makes this mildly funny, though I admit in quite poor taste, is the fact that Armstrong did indeed suffer of cancer to which he lost a testicle before his comeback to win multiple Tour de France back to back. So theoretically his EPO positive results could be attributed to those tumors producing it, if this research is to be believed. Maybe not all of the times though.
Tumors excreting chemicals to prevent destruction doesn’t sound like DNA damage, that sounds like evolution.
We know some cancers can be caused by viruses. And we know a few cancers that act like viruses in dogs and Tasmanian devils, and some rare cases in humans.
We only figured out that ulcers are bacterial in origin within the lifetimes of many HN readers, and there are signs that other GI issues may be bacterial or viral (or bacteria-targeting viral) as well.
Maybe we need to start culturing and DNA testing cancers.