Rare Immune Cells, Cytokine May Predict Response to Cancer Immunotherapy

Source: Genome Web, June 2018

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – The presence of certain rare immune cells and a cytokine one of them produces may affect how well cancer patients respond to immunotherapies, according to a new study.

While immunotherapies to jump-start T-cell responses have been successful in a portion of cancer patients, many don’t appear to respond to such treatments. The University of California, San Francisco’s Matthew Krummel and his colleagues previously uncovered a type of dendritic cell — which they dubbed stimulatory dendritic cells (SDCs) — in mice that appeared to help T cells respond to immunotherapy.