I'm not familiar enough with CD47 to know where else it is expressed, but I'm wondering what the "regular" use of CD47 is. Since it's over-expressed in cancers, I'm assuming the cancer is somehow mucking up the regulation pathway for CD47 and there are regular non-cancer related functions for CD47.
The trick to making this work will be hoping that blocking CD47 on healthy cells isn't particularly lethal (in humans), or getting the antibody to target ONLY cancerous cells.
edit: From the paper, it looks like the mice weren't unhappy with the antibody floating around -
"Importantly, the therapeutic anti-mCD47 [antibody] produced no unacceptable toxicity over the course of the experiment, despite having spread systemically. These experiments were analyzed at the end of the therapeutic regimen; acute infusion of these antibodies led to a short-term anemia."
It turns out the first paragraph in the paper gives a good indication for me – it's pretty much all over the shop, which makes the lack of toxicity here pretty interesting.
The trick to making this work will be hoping that blocking CD47 on healthy cells isn't particularly lethal (in humans), or getting the antibody to target ONLY cancerous cells.
edit: From the paper, it looks like the mice weren't unhappy with the antibody floating around -
"Importantly, the therapeutic anti-mCD47 [antibody] produced no unacceptable toxicity over the course of the experiment, despite having spread systemically. These experiments were analyzed at the end of the therapeutic regimen; acute infusion of these antibodies led to a short-term anemia."