Volume 18 Issue 3, March 2018

Intratumoural vaccination with immune-enhancing agents eradicates tumour metastases.

Chimeric antigen receptors that provide an antigen-dependent signal 3 to T cells have improved antitumour efficacy.

γδ T cells prevent the recurrence of malarial parasitaemia by producing M-CSF.

NK cells recruit cDC1s to the tumour microenviroment by producing the chemokines CCL5 and XCL1.

Pathobiont-specific peripherally derived regulatory T cells have an important role in maintaining gut homeostasis.

Jedd Wolchok describes a 1996 study by Alan Houghton and colleagues that showed how immune tolerance to self antigens on cancer cells could be overcome.

In this Review, the authors detail the complex expression patterns and regulation of programmed cell death protein 1 (PD1) and its ligands. The authors focus on the importance of understanding these pathways in order to optimize the efficiency and safety of immune checkpoint blockade in patients.

Recent studies showing that neoantigens are crucial targets of the antitumour immune response have supported the progression of personalized cancer vaccines to clinical trials.

Heeding the adage “prevention is better than cure”, Olivera J. Finn proposes that vaccinating individuals who have pre-malignant lesions gives the immune system the upper hand and can prevent progression to cancer.

Normalization of the tumour vasculature can improve immune effector cell infiltration, leading to immunotherapy potentiation. In this Opinion article, Huanget al. propose that reciprocal regulation between tumour vascular normalization and immune reprogramming forms a positive feedback loop that can induce durable antitumour immunity within the tumour microenvironment.

Could the specific glycosylation signatures associated with tumour cells be harnessed for immunotherapy purposes? In this Opinion, the authors propose that the tumour glyco-code may represent a novel immune checkpoint that could be targeted in the clinic.

Carl Figdor and colleagues propose that delivering cancer immunotherapy in the context of engineered three-dimensional scaffolds may boost anticancer immunity. The synthetic scaffolds, which can be linked to immunomodulatory factors, can act as immune niches to support the priming and maintenance of antitumour immune responses.