New approach to cancer treatment carries success with caveat
In people with chronic infections or cancer, disease-fighting T cells tend to behave like an overworked militia — wheezing, ill-prepared, tentative, in a state of “exhaustion” that allows disease to persist. In a paper posted online today by the journal Science, researchers at the Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center report that, in mice with chronic viral infection, exhausted T cells are controlled by a fundamentally different set of molecular circuits than T cells effectively battling infections or cancer. This finding suggests a way to increase the staying power of CAR T cells, a promising form of immunotherapy for cancer. An accompanying study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and co-authored by Dana-Farber scientists, reports that these differences in circuitry remain largely unchanged by a type of cancer immunotherapy known as checkpoint inhibition, potentially closing off one avenue of improving this technique. The studies bring renewed focus to the...