2018
September
NK cells may be the secret ingredient in PD-1/PD-L1 blockade
September 26, 2018
Although PD-1/PD-L1 blockade has classically targeted T cells, some tumors with low MHC-I expression respond to this treatment, which suggests that other cell types are also inhibited by PD-1 and respond to PD-1 blockade. As PD-1 is expressed on natural killer (NK) cells in several cancers, and loss of MHC expression increases the...
Rebooting the cancer immunity cycle by inducing necroptosis
September 19, 2018
The cancer immunity cycle is the body’s natural way of staving off cancer, but in instances when cancer has already escaped this cycle, inducing immunogenic tumor cell death may be an effective way to reboot the system. In a recent study published in Nature Communications, Van Hoecke et al. explored the use of...
Siglec-9: the newest checkpoint in town
September 12, 2018
Despite exciting clinical success, resistance to immune checkpoint inhibitors remains a widespread problem, and researchers are always on the hunt for new treatment targets that might improve T cell functionality. In a recent paper published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Stanczak and Siddiqui et al. set out to address this problem by...
The TIDE is turning for checkpoint blockade biomarkers
September 5, 2018
Predicting whether a patient will respond to immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) and identifying resistance regulators are key research goals in cancer immunotherapy. With current biomarkers still falling short of accurate prediction, Jiang, Gu, and Pan et al. developed a computational method called Tumor Immune Dysfunction and Exclusion (TIDE) that models mechanisms of tumor...
