Benefit more cancer patients. This method allows the immune cells to be fully fired.

Cancer immunotherapy contains great development potential and has become the hope of some cancer patients
.
At present, one of the most important methods in immunotherapy is immune checkpoint inhibitor (ICI), which can remove the camouflage of cancer cells, allowing the immune system to recognize tumors and eliminate them

Although ICI can treat some tumor types, the proportion of these patients in the total number of cancer patients is still very low.
For example, only about 25% of patients with non-small cell lung cancer can respond optimistically to ICI
.
Why is immunotherapy ineffective for the remaining 75% of patients?

To this end, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine reviewed past research on immunotherapy
.
They collected blood, tumor and healthy tissue samples from patients with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer obtained in previous studies

These patients all received ICI treatment before the tumor was removed
.
Results Nine out of 20 patients had a good response to ICI.

The researchers isolated CD8+ T cells from their samples and explored how they would respond to some oncogenic mutant proteins and proteins produced by influenza virus or Epstein-Barr virus
.

The results showed that the total number of CD8+ T cells in the tumors of the two groups was almost the same, and the number of cells that could respond to the above-mentioned proteins was almost the same
.
So what went wrong?

After the researchers carefully analyzed their transcriptome, some clues surfaced
.
T cells from different patients have slightly different gene expressions

In other words, the T cells of these patients have stronger anti-cancer ability and produce fewer proteins that inhibit cell activity
.
In a patient with an excellent response to ICI, the T cells in his body that respond to cancer proteins have reprogrammed their transcriptomes into complete tumor killer cells

The remaining 75% of patients are not so lucky.
Their T cells often produce proteins that inhibit activity, and T cell efficiency will also decrease
.
This shows that these transcriptome differences may be used as targets for improvement, so that patients who do not respond to immunotherapy can also benefit from therapy

In fact, there are also transcriptome differences between T cells that respond to cancer proteins and T cells that respond to viral proteins.

Note: The original text has been deleted

Reference materials:

[1]Caushi, JX, Zhang, J.

[2]Right program could turn immune cells into cancer killers.