Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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checkpoint inhibitors

Peeling away pancreatic cancers’ defenses

At Winship Cancer Institute, pancreatic cancer researcher Greg Lesinski and colleagues have a new paper in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics. It’s about a combination immunotherapy approach that gets through pancreatic cancers’ extra defenses, and it represents the preclinical counterpart to a clinical trial that is underway and almost finished at Winship, under the direction of GI oncologist Bassel El-Rayes.

Immunotherapies have transformed how other forms of cancer are treated, but for pancreatic cancers, an obstacle is getting through the dense layers of cellular shielding that the cancers build around themselves. Pancreatic cancers create “nests” of fibrotic stellate cells that pump out inflammatory cytokines such as IL-6.

Pancreatic cancer is anticipated to become the second deadliest cancer in the United States by 2030, surpassing breast and colon cancer.

“Inflammation and a good immune response don’t always go hand in hand,” El-Rayes told us, for a 2018 Winship magazine article. “High IL-6 causes immune exhaustion, and keeps the good cells out of the tumor.”

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Posted on October 19, 2020 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer Leave a comment

Transition to exhaustion: clues for cancer immunotherapy

Research on immune cells “exhausted” by chronic viral infection provides clues on how to refine cancer immunotherapy. The results were published Tuesday, Dec. 3 in Immunity.

Scientists at Emory Vaccine Center, led by Rafi Ahmed, PhD, have learned about exhausted CD8 T cells, based on studying mice with chronic viral infections. In the presence of persistent virus or cancer, CD8 T cells lose much of their ability to fight disease, and display inhibitory checkpoint proteins such as PD-1 on their surfaces. PD-1 is targeted by cancer immunotherapy drugs, such as pembrolizumab and nivolumab, which allow CD8 T cells to regain their ability to attack and kill infected cells and cancers.

Those drugs are now FDA-approved for several types of cancer, yet some types of tumors do not respond to them. Studying exhausted CD8 T cells can help us understand how to better draw the immune system into action against cancer or chronic infections.

In previous research, Ahmed’s lab found that exhausted cells are not all alike, and the diversity within the exhausted T cell pool could explain variability in responses to cancer immunotherapy drugs. Specifically, they observed that a population of “stem-like” cells proliferated in response to PD-1-blocking drugs, while a more differentiated population of exhausted cells stayed inactive. The stem-like cells are responsible for maintaining the exhausted T cell population, but cannot kill virus-infected or tumor cells on their own.

The current paper defines a transitional stage in between the stem-like and truly exhausted cells. The truly exhausted cells are marked by a molecule called CD101, and are unable to migrate to sites of infection and contain lower amounts of proteins needed to kill infected or tumor cells.

“The transitional cells are not completely exhausted,” says postdoctoral fellow Will Hudson, PhD, first author of the Immunity paper. “They are still capable of proliferating and performing their ‘killer cell’ functions. In our experiments, they contribute to viral control.”

The transitional cells, lacking CD101, could be a good marker for response to PD-1 blocking drugs, Hudson says. Enhancing the proliferation or survival of these cells, or preventing their transition to lasting exhaustion, may be a novel therapeutic strategy for cancer. Read more

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Quinn Eastman in Immunology Leave a comment

Immunotherapy for triple negative breast cancer

Treatments that unleash the immune system against cancer have been a hot topic for the last few years, but they do not appear in our recent feature on breast cancer for Winship Cancer Institute’s magazine.

Partly, that’s because decent avenues for treatment exist for most types of breast cancer, with improvements in survival since the 1980s. Immunotherapy’s successes have been more dramatic for types of cancer against which progress had been otherwise meager, such as lung cancers and metastatic melanoma.

Jane Meisel, MD with patient

Winship oncologist Jane Meisel, MD with patient

However, for “triple-negative” breast cancer (TNBC) in particular, immunotherapy could be a good match, because of the scarcity of targeted treatments and because TNBC’s genomic instability may be well-suited to immunotherapy.

Winship oncologists Jane Meisel and Keerthi Gogineni inform Lab Land that several early-phase clinical studies open to breast cancer patients, testing “checkpoint inhibitor” agents such as PD-1 inhibitors, are underway. More are pending.

Meisel’s presentation at Winship’s Sea Island retreat says that immunotherapy is “not yet ready for prime time, but a very promising experimental approach for a subset of patients for whom current therapies are not sufficient. We need to better understand which subsets of patients are most likely to benefit, and how we can use other therapies to enhance efficacy in patients who don’t initially respond.”

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Posted on October 18, 2016 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer Leave a comment

Why checkpoint inhibitors fall short for some types of cancer

The big news from the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting has been largely about immunotherapy drugs, also known as checkpoint inhibitors. These drugs have been shown to be effective in prolonging life in patients with some types of cancer, such as lung cancer and melanoma, but not others, such as colorectal and prostate cancer.

Lab Land asked oncologist Bradley Carthon and immunology researcher Haydn Kissick why. Both Carthon’s clinical work and Kissick’s lab research on prostate cancer are featured in the new issue of Winship magazine, but the prostate feature just touches on checkpoint inhibitors briefly.

Carthon says the reason checkpoint inhibitors haven’t moved the needle with prostate cancer is “likely due to the absence of infiltration of the prostatic tissue by tumor-associated lymphocytes.”

Checkpoint inhibitors are supposed to unleash the immune system, but if the immune cells aren’t in contact with the cancer cells so that the drugs can spur them into action, they won’t help much. Carthon says: “The answer may be to ‘prime’ the prostate with an agent, then introduce the checkpoint inhibitors.” Read more

Posted on June 8, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer, Immunology Leave a comment