A Cleveland Clinic-led research collaboration between Timothy Chan, MD, Ph.D., Chair of Cleveland Clinic's Global Center for Immunotherapy, and Bristol Myers Squibb has published the most comprehensive overview to date of how the immune system reshapes tumor architecture in response to immune checkpoint therapy.
The eight-year study, published in Nature Medicine , outlines how cancer immunotherapy induces tumor recognition through neoantigens to reshape the tumor ecosystem. Neoantigens are small peptides produced when cancer cells mutate and are a primary marker for the immune system to recognize cancer cells as different from self. "This study is unique in that we sampled tumors prior to therapy and then early after immunotherapy was initiated," explains Dr.
Chan, who is also chair of Cleveland Clinic's Center for Immunotherapy & Precision Immuno-Oncology, program leader of Case Comprehensive Cancer Center's Immune Oncology Program and the Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak Endowed Chair in Immunotherapy. "Our goal was to understand how patients' tumors are recognized and altered by their immune system in response to immunotherapy." Our immune cells and cancer cells constantly interact and influence one another over the course of cancer.
Immunotherapy treatments need to operate within that framework by boosting our immune cells to eliminate cancer. Scientists like Dr. Chan have begun to untangle the complex relationships among treatment, immunity and cancer in the past 15 years—b.