STING Like a Bee: MIT’s Revolutionary Approach to Cancer Immunotherapy — A cancer vaccine combining |
Belcher and Hammond Lab researchers developed a cancer vaccine that could make checkpoint blockade therapies more effective for more patients. Credit: Bendta Schroeder
While in some cases checkpoint blockade therapies elicit a strong immune response that clears tumors, checkpoint inhibitors do not work for all tumor types or all patients. Moreover, some patients who do experience an initial benefit from these therapies see their cancers recur. Only a small minority of patients treated with checkpoint blockade therapies see lasting benefits.
The STING pathway holds promise as a partner for immune checkpoint blockade therapies because of its key role in raising immune response to pathogens and cancer cells. The pathway is also known to impact the immune system in other ways, including the maturation, specialization, and activation of certain types of immune cells.
In the present study, the team added one more component to the STING-cGAMP complex: a smaller form of an antibody known as a nanobody carrying immune checkpoint blockade therapy. In clinical cancer treatments, CD4+ T cells play various roles in the immune system and are usually associated with immunosuppression. Subsequently, most research on checkpoint blockade therapies and the STING pathway has centered on other types of immune cells whose roles in raising immune responses are better understood — for instance, natural killer cells and CD8+ T cells, both of which are responsible for attacking tumor cells.
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