Weekly Digests

2021

March

How do we improve DC vaccines? Let us count the ways.

March 31, 2021

In previous arms of a sequential, multi-arm, ovarian cancer clinical trial, Tanyi and Chiang et al. showed that the use of a dendritic cell vaccine consisting of DCs pulsed with oxidized autologous whole tumor lysate (OCDC) can elicit T cell responses to tumor-associated antigens and neoantigens. They also showed that the addition of Bevacizumab...

TIL going viral: detection of TCR cross-specificity for viral and tumor antigens

March 24, 2021

Virus-specific tumor-infiltrating T cells have previously been considered bystander cells not contributing to the antitumor response in the same way that T cells specific to tumor-associated antigens (TAAs) might. To begin to unpack the vast amount of TCR sequence data available from tumor and normal tissue samples, Chiou and Tseng et al. used...

T cells and myeloid cells may be in a “dysfunctional” friendship

March 17, 2021

The role of the tumor immune microenvironment (TME) in tumor progression is increasingly appreciated, but for certain cancers, our understanding remains incomplete. Recently, single-cell analysis techniques have enabled comprehensive analysis and supported our knowledge of tumor development and treatment response. Now published in Cancer Cell, Braun and Street et al. used single-cell RNA...

Defining CD4+ T cells with a license to kill

March 10, 2021

The helper function of CD4+ T cells in antitumor immune responses has been characterized, but much less is known about the role of cytotoxic CD4+ Th cells (Th-CTX) in tumors. Cachot, Bilous, and Liu et al. investigated the presence, phenotype, and cytolytic function of tumor-specific Th-CTX using single-cell transcriptomics, peptide–MHC-II multimers, and a...

Epitope spreading is spreading success in immunotherapy

March 3, 2021

Successful immune checkpoint blockade in patients with melanoma is often associated with a high mutational burden, a high level of predicted neoantigens, and an interesting side effect – vitiligo. In a study recently published in Science Translational Medicine, Lo et al. investigated whether vitiligo, an autoimmune reaction against melanocytes, contributes to the efficacy of...

Close Modal

Small change for you. Big change for us!

This Thanksgiving season, show your support for cancer research by donating your change.

In less than a minute, link your credit card with our partner RoundUp App.

Every purchase you make with that card will be rounded up and the change will be donated to ACIR.

All transactions are securely made through Stripe.