Scanning electron micrograph of a human T cellNIAID/NIHImmunotherapy has emerged as a promising way to tackle cancer over the last few years, and researchers at this year’s American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Washington, DC, reported on several areas of progress in the field. In a plenary lecture on Sunday (April 7), Suzanne Topalian of Johns Hopkins University argued that despite the current dogma that cancer is a genetic disease, it can also be viewed as “an immunologic disorder.” Indeed, she said, “in many ways the adaptive immune system is an ideal anti-cancer therapy,” if it can be trained to recognize and attack tumor cells that it would otherwise tolerate.
Topalian described efforts to “release the brakes” acting on the immune system by targeting inhibitory receptors on T cells that tumor cells bind in order to evade attack. She presented evidence showing that plugging the programmed death 1 (PD-1) receptor on T cells with an anti-PD-1 antibody called nivolumab results in tumor shrinkage in patients with non-small cell lung cancer, melanoma, and renal-cell cancer, an improvement that in some cases was maintained long after treatment ended. The immune system’s capacity for memory makes it a “living therapy,” she said. Nivolumab, made by Bristol-Myers Squibb, is currently in Phase 3 clinical trials for these three cancers.
At an earlier AACR session, several pioneers in the field discussed a different approach to retraining the immune system to ...
