Abrogating the immunoevasive role of the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) represents a critical yet still elusive challenge in cancer treatment. Progress in this area has been hampered by both technological limitations and incomplete understanding…
A team of scientists led by Quigley Goa demonstrates that Poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors (PARPi) can induce tumor cell death in a manner that allows immune cells to better recognize and attack the tumor. Specifically, PARPi are approved…
Cancer immunotherapy (IO) enables patients to live well with cancer for many years, or even be cured. Several investigational IO agents recently failed in early-phase or late-phase trials, leading some to doubt the future of IO. Patient heterogeneity …
The notion of immune editing and its defined phases (elimination, equilibrium, and escape), once a transformed cell emerges, is now well established. What occurs prior to, and may in fact impact, transformation—inflammation, initiation, and ince…
Tumor-associated macrophages (TAMs), long exploited by cancers to evade immune detection, can now be reprogrammed into potent antitumor effectors through cutting-edge viral engineering. In a landmark study published in the Journal for Immunotherapy of…
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) remains resistant to immunotherapy due to a highly immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment. Lahusen et al identify transglutaminase 2 (TGM2) as a critical tumor cell-intrinsic regulator of immune suppression in…
Interleukin-2 (IL-2) was one of the first immunotherapies in the treatment of patients with cancer. High-dose bolus IL-2 (HD IL-2) can induce durable complete or partial tumor regression in a small proportion of advanced melanoma and renal cell carcin…
After 15 years of clinical testing and analyses of biopsies from patients with cancers treated with antibodies blocking the programmed death receptor 1 (PD-1) pathway, several requirements for inducing durable clinical responses have become evident. T…
Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) therapies have revolutionized cancer treatment by enabling immune cells to target tumor cells with high specificity. While extensive research has focused on optimizing single-chain variable fragment (scFv) affinity in C…
