Science Advances: Carcinogenic!

In recent years, immunotherapy has shown great promise, but in fact, the effect of this therapy on many types of cancer is not satisfactory, especially for "cold tumors", which is basically ineffective, mainly due to the amount of cancer cell mutations in the cold tumor environment.
The few are pitiful and difficult to be recognized by the immune system.
For this reason, researchers boldly speculate whether increasing the amount of mutations in cancer-treatment genes can transform "cold tumors" into "hot tumors"?

Recently, this conjecture has been verified.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) published an article titled CD8+ T cell immunity blocks the metastasis of carcinogen-exposed breast cancer in "Science Advances".
Stimulation can induce the immune activation pathway of CD8+ T cells, promote immunogenic transformation, and effectively inhibit the spread of cancer cells
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In order to determine the effect of exposed carcinogens on "cold tumor" breast cancer, the researchers constructed a mature spontaneous breast cancer mouse model, and used the carcinogen "2,2-dimethylolbutyric acid (DMBA)" to stimulate small In mice, studies have found that although the tumor growth rate of mice stimulated by DMBA becomes faster, the phenomenon of cancer metastasis is significantly reduced, which shows that breast cancer metastasis under DMBA exposure is effectively blocked
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Breast cancer metastasis in DMBA-exposed animals is blocked

As we all know, CD8 + T cells are a subgroup of T lymphocytes, which secrete various cytokines to participate in immune activities, have a killing effect on tumor cells and other antigenic substances, and can form an important line of defense for the body's anti-tumor immunity with natural killer cells
.

Therefore, in order to verify whether T cells can block breast cancer metastasis exposed to DMBA, the researchers analyzed the infiltrating T cells in primary breast cancer tissues stimulated by DMBA and found that a large number of T cells gathered near breast tumors.
It is worth noting that when the T cells in the mice are knocked out, the lung metastasis of breast cancer increases significantly, which shows that CD8+ T cells block the metastasis of breast cancer in mice exposed to DMBA Important element
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Blocking breast cancer metastasis in DMBA-treated PyMT mice requires CD8 + T cells

In recent years, because the chemokine CCL21 and its receptor CCR7 play an important role in the selective and specific metastasis of tumor cells, they have gradually become a new target for anti-tumor metastasis drug therapy, and various CCL21-based immunotherapy strategies continue to emerge.

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Preliminary studies have found that CCL21 can promote T cells to participate in lymphocyte homing and strongly drive T lymphocytes
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CCL21 inhibits breast tumor growth by inducing anti-tumor CD8 + T cell immunity in vivo

In fact, this unique concept of suppressing cancer has been reflected in the treatment of lung cancer as early as possible
.

This is mainly due to the fact that the number of genetic mutations in smoking lung cancer patients is more than 10 times that of non-smokers, and the more genetic mutations, the more immune cells can recognize tumor cells and the better its killing effect
.

Original source:

Kaiwen Li, et al.