ABOVE: Immune cells (red and magenta) infiltrate a skin tumor (yellow) in this biopsy from a patient with melanoma.
TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH LABORATORY, MELANOMA INSTITUTE AUSTRALIA
Targeted therapy and immunotherapy are often employed as a one-two punch to treat certain cancers, but sometimes this approach falls short. In a study published on July 15 in Nature Cancer, researchers found that dendritic cells, cells crucial for activating the immune system during immunotherapy, were less active and less numerous in mouse models of melanoma that had become resistant to targeted therapy, explaining why these tumors were less sensitive to immunotherapy. Stimulating dendritic cells restored the tumors’ response to immunotherapy.
“This study provides mechanistic insight into a phenomenon that many melanoma experts have observed firsthand in the clinic and that has recently been described in retrospective studies: poor response to immunotherapy following the development of resistance to [targeted] therapy,” Brent Hanks, a medical oncologist ...
