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A type 2 cytokine fusion with type 1 effects – using IL-4 to enhance antitumor immunity

Interleukin 4 (IL-4), a cytokine typically associated with humoral (type 2) immune responses, has recently been shown to promote survival in T and B cells. Studying whether IL-4 could be exploited to enhance cancer immunotherapy, Feng and Bai et al....

Crosslinking of Ly6a metabolically reprograms CD8 T cells for cancer immunotherapy

Maliah et al. showed that mice receiving chronic UVB exposure prior to s.c. or i.v. injection of melanoma cells exhibited enhanced growth of local tumors, but not metastases; reduced skin-draining LN,...

Spatial analysis reveals targetable macrophage-mediated mechanisms of immune evasion in hepatocellular carcinoma minimal residual disease

Using post-chemoembolization residual human hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), Lemaitre, Adeniji, and Suresh et al. identified a spatial neighborhood of PD-L1+ M2-like macrophages and stem-like tumor cel...

Preclinical Evaluation of AZD6422, an Armored Chimeric Antigen Receptor T Cell Targeting CLDN18.2 in Gastric, Pancreatic, and Esophageal Cancer

Barrett et al designed a CLDN18.2 CAR T cell product incorporating a CLDN18.2 binding domain (selected on the basis of cytotoxicity, despite its low affinity), a dnTGFβ receptor, and a shortened expan...

Engineered allogeneic T cells decoupling T-cell-receptor and CD3 signalling enhance the antitumour activity of bispecific antibodies

Kapetanovic et al. used targeted genomic mutagenesis of the FGxGT motif in the TRAJ region to develop Allogeneic-Engineered Decoupled (AED) T cells, for which TCR–antigen binding was functionally deco...

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Previous Digests

Unmasking higher immunotherapy efficacy potential with a new IL-2 therapy

October 2, 2024

Attempts to avoid systemic toxicity and Treg activation induced by IL-2-directed therapy has resulted in the development of various engineered immunotherapy products that specifically target IL-2Rβ/γ on CD8+ T cells and NK cells. However, these products have, so far...

A sweet spot in the spleen for immune checkpoint blockade responses

September 25, 2024

Immune checkpoint blockade unleashes powerful antitumor T cell responses, but exactly which T cell states are involved and from which anatomic locations they emerge are not fully understood. Investigating these topics, Morgan, Horton, Bhandarkar, et al. profiled T cells...

Flipping the script: reprogramming tumor cells into DCs

September 18, 2024

Type 1 conventional dendritic cells (cDC1s) are required for T cell-mediated tumor regression and response to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) in cancer. However, current immunotherapy strategies are not focused on exploiting key aspects of cDC1 functionality in vivo, such...

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ACIR's mission is to fast-track cancer immunotherapy research by helping researchers stay on top of the new literature in this fast-moving and multifaceted field, fostering their creativity and productivity in bringing us ever closer to curing this deadly disease.

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I am pleased to voice my support for the mission of ACIR to keep cancer immunotherapy researchers up to date with the current advancements in the field. Given the magnitude of new information emerging from this field, I particularly appreciate their efforts to both identify and highlight the key advancements each week and to distill the new information to key take-away points that can be easily grasped.

— Nir Hacohen, PhD

Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Director, MGH Center for Cancer Immunology; Institute Member, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT

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