2023
February
Improving D2C7-immunotoxin therapy with agonist CD40
February 22, 2023
Glioblastomas (GBMs) are highly intracranially invasive and resistant to immunotherapy. In a recent phase 1 clinical trial, researchers evaluated D2C7 – an immunotoxin consisting of Pseudomonas exotoxin A and a recombinant antibody fragment that targets wild-type EGFR (EGFRwt) and mutant EGFR variant III (EGFRvIII) proteins present in GBM – in patients with recurrent...
New source of tumor antigens found that is targetable with immunotherapy
February 15, 2023
Epigenetic alterations, such as the derepression of transposable elements (TEs), are common events in cancer. Two recent papers from Amigorena and colleagues published in Science Immunology investigated whether non-canonical splice junctions between exons and TEs may serve as a source of tumor antigens in murine models and patient samples. To identify non-canonical splicing...
Location, location, location: why lung tumors trigger weak immune responses in mice
February 8, 2023
In an effort to better understand why mice mount weaker immune responses to tumors in the lungs than to those in the flank, Zagorulya et al. compared immune priming in their respective tumor-draining lymph nodes: the mediastinal lymph node (mLN) and the inguinal lymph node (iLN). As they unraveled this mechanism underlying these...
Interferon signaling can be too much of a good thing in the immunotherapy setting
February 1, 2023
Despite the important role that Type I (IFNα and β) and Type II (IFNγ) interferons have in antitumor immunity, both by upregulating HLA in cancer cells and activating T cells, prolonged IFN signaling can be pro-tumorigenic and has been associated with immunotherapy resistance. Therefore, Qiu and Xu et al. investigated whether interfering with...
