In the News
Brain tumor patients with glioblastoma (GBM) face extremely limited treatment options and show poor responses to current immunotherapies. New treatment strategies are desperately needed.
Wnt signaling is a crucial cell communication process that regulates various aspects of stem cell behavior. It is also pivotal in the generation of GBM and contributes to treatment resistance.
In this new study, we identify Wnt7b, which is highly expressed in GBM patients, as a previously unknown determinant of resistance to immune checkpoint blockers.
Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is a highly aggressive cancer commonly driven by activating KRASmutations and TP53 alterations. While TP53 missense mutations are known to disrupt the tumor-suppressive functions of wild-type p53, their potential gain-of-function (GOF) roles remain less well understood. In this study, we investigated whether TP53 missense mutations contribute to tumor progression through GOF mechanisms, and assessed their impact on cancer cell-intrinsic transcriptional programs as well as the composition and function of the tumor immune microenvironment (TME) in PDAC.
Check out the interview that describes the study HERE.
Rakesh Jain, PhD, director of the Edwin Steele Laboratories for Tumor Biology in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Andrew Werk Professor of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School, is senior and corresponding author of a paper published in the Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer, “IL-1β Blockade Prevents Cardiotoxicity and Improves Efficacy of Immune Checkpoint Blockers and Chemotherapy against Pancreatic Cancer in Mice with Obesity.