Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Jump-starting T cells in skin cancer

Advanced melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer, can be successfully treated in some cases by vaccinating patients with tumor proteins. How these vaccines work and why they are only effective in some patients remains unclear. Pierre Coulie and colleagues now show, in two articles in the January 17 issue of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, that these vaccines work by increasing the number of immune cells called killer T cells that can attack the tumor. In an unexpected finding, however, they discovered that that these cells mostly recognize tumor proteins that were not contained in the vaccine. Understanding the characteristics of the T cell populations that are expanded after vaccination may help in the development of more effective anti-tumor vaccines.

Tumor-specific T cells can be detected in the blood and the tumors of many melanoma patients, and yet these cells are unable to kill the tumor. What causes the impotence of these T cells is a mystery. Equally mysterious is why vaccination against tumor-specific proteins sometimes causes tumor regression without expanding large numbers of vaccine-specific killer T cells.

Pierre Coulie’s group studied anti-tumor T cells in patients vaccinated with a tumor antigen called MAGE-3. In one patient whose tumor regressed after vaccination, the authors found significantly more T cells specific for non-vaccine tumor proteins than were detected before vaccination. Vaccine-specific T cells, on the other hand, became detectable but did not expand to large numbers. Thus, reinvigoration of existing tumor-specific T cells after vaccination did not require large numbers of vaccine-specific T cells.

Nickey Henry | EurekAlert!
Further information:
http://www.rockefeller.edu
http://www.jem.org

Im Focus: Manipulating Electron Spins Without Loss of Information

Physicists have developed a new technique that uses electrical voltages to control the electron spin on a chip. The newly-developed method provides protection from spin decay, meaning that the contained information can be maintained and transmitted over comparatively large distances, as has been demonstrated by a team from the University of Basel’s Department of Physics and the Swiss Nanoscience Institute. The results have been published in Physical Review X.

For several years, researchers have been trying to use the spin of an electron to store and transmit information. The spin of each electron is always coupled...

Im Focus: The proton precisely weighted

What is the mass of a proton? Scientists from Germany and Japan successfully did an important step towards the most exact knowledge of this fundamental constant. By means of precision measurements on a single proton, they could improve the precision by a factor of three and also correct the existing value.

To determine the mass of a single proton still more accurate – a group of physicists led by Klaus Blaum and Sven Sturm of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear...

Im Focus: On the way to a biological alternative

A bacterial enzyme enables reactions that open up alternatives to key industrial chemical processes

The research team of Prof. Dr. Oliver Einsle at the University of Freiburg's Institute of Biochemistry has long been exploring the functioning of nitrogenase....

Im Focus: The 1 trillion tonne iceberg

Larsen C Ice Shelf rift finally breaks through

A one trillion tonne iceberg - one of the biggest ever recorded -- has calved away from the Larsen C Ice Shelf in Antarctica, after a rift in the ice,...

Im Focus: Laser-cooled ions contribute to better understanding of friction

Physics supports biology: Researchers from PTB have developed a model system to investigate friction phenomena with atomic precision

Friction: what you want from car brakes, otherwise rather a nuisance. In any case, it is useful to know as precisely as possible how friction phenomena arise –...