Autophagy: autophagy of dendritic cells can improve their anticancer activity

May 22, 2019 news / BIOON / - autophagy contributes to cell homeostasis Recently, it has been reported that autophagy has another function KAIST's team found that autophagy of dendritic cells supports the antitumor activity of T cells Autophagy is a process of maintaining cell homeostasis by removing waste and damaged organelles; however, its role in phagocytosis of tumor associated antigen expression is still unclear Photo source: autophagy at the same time, dendritic cells are cells that recognize pathogens or cancer antigens and induce immune responses in T cells When cancer cells are killed by radiation or anticancer drugs, dendritic cells absorb and remove them, present antigens on the surface, and transfer them to T cells Professor Heung kyu Lee of the Graduate School of medical science and engineering and his team found that autophagy of dendritic cells plays a key role in T cell activation, and they proposed the principle of enhancing the anti-cancer effect Their experiments show that when dendritic cells lack ATG5 (autophagy related gene), the activation of T cells and the anti-cancer immune response will decrease Interestingly, atg5-deficient dendritic cells significantly increased the cell surface receptor CD36, increased the phagocytosis of apoptotic tumor cells, but limited the activation of T cells At this time, in order to block the receptor CD36, when introducing antibodies into the system, the response of anti-tumor T cells increased significantly, while the tumor growth decreased Professor Lee said: "this study enables us to explore the role of autophagy in the anti-cancer immune response of T cells We are looking forward to using CD36 receptor to develop targeted anticancer therapy "The study was published in the journal autophagy Reference: Dong sun Oh et al Autohagy protein ATG5 regulates CD36 expression and anti tumor MHC class II antigen presentatio in dendritic cells, autohagy (2019) Doi: 10.1080/15548627.2019.1596493