2026
June
Neutrophils not so neutral in tumors after all
June 24, 2026
Neutrophils in tumors are known to play both pro- and anti-inflammatory roles, but how they affect responses to immunotherapy is incompletely understood. In work recently published in Immunity, Pei et al. evaluated neutrophils in the context of several cancer immunotherapies, and found that treatment-driven increases in IFNγ production in tumors drove neutrophils towards...
taNKs on the frontline: CD39+ NK cells in the antitumor response
June 17, 2026
NK cell antitumor therapies are under development, but the functional states of tumoral NK cells remain poorly understood, limiting progress. Serger et al. profiled NK cells from non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) samples, identifying targetable subsets for immunotherapy. Their findings were published in Science Immunology. Single-nucleus RNAseq and ATACseq were performed on tumor...
Unraveling the role of CCR1 in tumor myeloid cells
June 10, 2026
Pancreatic cancer (PDA) is a highly resistant and difficult-to-treat tumor type, often marked by extensive fibroinflammatory stroma and infiltration of immunosuppressive myeloid cells. These myeloid cells, including macrophages and granulocytes, have been noted to have high expression of CCR1, though the role of this chemokine receptor has not been thoroughly studied. In recent...
AI reads between the sequences to decode TCR specificity
June 3, 2026
Predicting TCR recognition from sequence alone is challenging because TCRs with low sequence similarity may bind the same peptide–MHC (pMHC), whereas nearly identical TCR sequences may bind different pMHCs. Wang, Yeh, et al. developed a new approach to map TCR recognition using high-throughput yeast display and protein language models (pLMs). Their work was...
