2020
March
Special announcement
March 25, 2020
To All Our Readers, The COVID-19 crisis has dominated the world's attention and caused major changes in all our lives. To give our team members the chance to adjust to this ever-intensifying landscape we decided to take a brief 2 week pause in publishing our newsletter. Despite this pause, our staff and our volunteers...
Bee venom throws a one-two punch to kill the tumor
March 18, 2020
Targeting the tumor where it lives and turning the tumor against itself was what Yu and Dai et al. had in mind when they developed a one-two punch nanovaccine comprising a lipid nanoparticle (NP) loaded with melittin (a peptide found in European bee venom), called α-melittin-NP. The vaccine, which contained no tumor antigens...
Put me in, coach! Peripheral T cells are ready to play
March 11, 2020
In an effort to investigate the origin, behavior, and fate of T cells in patients with cancer, Wu et al. sequenced 330 million mRNA transcripts from 141,623 T cells, which had been isolated from the tumors and normal adjacent tissue (NAT) of 14 treatment-naive patients with 4 different types of cancer; peripheral blood samples...
Zeroing in on intratumoral Tregs via CD36
March 4, 2020
With the goal of selectively disrupting intratumoral Tregs without inducing systemic autoimmunity, Wang et al. hypothesized that intratumoral Tregs must metabolically adapt to the harsh conditions of the tumor microenvironment (TME), and therefore explored metabolic pathways that could potentially target Tregs exclusively within the TME to find actionable targets. The results, recently published...
