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Tumours with certain cancer-driving mutations are difficult to treat. A discovery that one enzyme both controls proliferation and suppresses anticancer immune defences presages the exploration of new cancer-therapy strategies.
Judith A. Varner is in the Moores Cancer Center, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California 92093, USA, and in the Department of Pathology, University of California, San Diego.
The legendary forces of the Universe — such as fire and water, or light and darkness — are in perpetual balance, and in mythology, disruptions in this balance cause mayhem. In cells, disruption in the delicate balance between two opposing types of enzyme, kinase and phosphatase, also leads to chaos. Kinases light cellular signal flares by adding phosphate groups to targeted proteins, and this action is doused by phosphatases, which remove the phosphates. One such opposing pair is the kinase PI3Kβ and the phosphatase PTEN, which together profoundly affect cellular and organismal fate. Writing in Nature, Bergholz et al.1 demonstrate that an imbalance between PI3Kβ and PTEN not only drives proliferation of tumour cells, but also strongly promotes tumour evasion of immune-system defences, leading to breast cancer progression and resistance to state-of-the-art cancer immunotherapy. The authors show how powerful tumour-promoting mutations can initiate signalling cascades that stimulate tumour-cell proliferation and immunosuppression, and identify a single therapeutic strategy that can control both pathways.
Read the paper: PI3Kβ controls immune evasion in PTEN-deficient breast tumours
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