Cancers in different tissue types develop unique genetic mechanisms to avoid discovery and destruction by the immune system, suggests a new study in mice by scientists at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Dana-Farber Cancer Center.
The findings, published Sept. 17 in Science, could explain why some cancer types respond to current immunotherapies while others don’t—laying the foundation for researchers to develop new, tissue-specific cancer immunotherapies that disable a broader range of immune evasion pathways.
In order to really understand how to treat cancers, you need to understand how they’re escaping the immune system,” said study leader Stephen Elledge, the Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and of Medicine at HMS and Brigham and Women’s.
“Right now, we think there’s a mismatch between the tools we have to encourage the immune system to attack and the different mechanisms cancers use to evade those attacks,” he said.
