Clinicians struggle to treat triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), one of the most aggressive forms of the disease. While a combination of immunotherapy and chemotherapy is approved to combat metastatic TNBC, this therapy only helps a small portion of patients. Often patients initially see promising results, but then their cancer comes back, possibly due to resistant cells that survived the treatment to regrow tumors.
Despite these challenges, Judith Agudo, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, holds hope for cancer immunotherapy’s future. “That's really my overarching dream: to use the immune system to cure cancer. I really believe that we have in our bodies the power to cure cancer if we find a way.”
In a recent study published in Cell, Agudo described her team’s efforts to understand the factors that contribute to breast cancer therapy relapse.1 The scientists hunted for immunotherapy-resistant cells and sought to understand how they avoided immune ...
