CXCL10: a promising marker for immunotherapy response in metastatic melanoma

Source: News Wise, January 2022

Newswise — Immunotherapy has emerged as a major new type of treatment for cancer. This form of therapy is a way of harnessing a patient’s own immune system to recognize and destroy tumor cells. One of the most widely utilized type of immunotherapy drug targets an immune inhibitory pathway called PD-1. Drugs blocking PD-1 have been FDA approved for 15 distinct cancer entities. Despite this important success, many patients do not respond to anti-PD-1 therapy. The laboratory of Thomas Gajewski, MD, PhD, has been focusing on identifying the mechanisms involved when anti-PD-1 works, in order to develop new therapies that can turn non-responders into responders.

Gajewski is a clinician-scientist and the AbbVie Foundation Professor of Cancer Immunotherapy. His lab studies how a type of immune cells, called T cells, can fight melanoma and other cancers. The Gajewski laboratory previously established that, in order for T cells to fight cancer, the T cells need to migrate into the tumor microenvironment. A major factor driving the attraction of T cells into tumor sites was found to be a chemokine called CXCL10. This chemokine binds a receptor on activated T cells called CXCR3, which promotes directional trafficking of T cells into the tumor.

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