Volume 5 Issue 3, March 2024

Gold-standard cancer data management is pivotal to enable precision medicine for European citizens. Achieving this goal relies on key elements: adopting standardized data formats, ensuring robust data privacy, educating professionals about the infrastructure’s benefits and leveraging cutting-edge technologies to transform cancer care.

Identifying which patients will benefit most from immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) is an important clinical challenge. A study now finds that Vδ1⁺ γδ T cells are associated with better response to ICB in melanoma tumors with a lower neoantigen load and shows that some effector functions of PD-1⁺ Vδ1⁺ T cells are repressed after engagement of PD-1 by PD-L1.

Effectively targeting deregulated KRAS signaling remains an unmet clinical need, as current approaches commonly lead to the development of chemoresistance in clinical settings. ADAM9-mediated lysosomal KRAS degradation is now shown to counteract PDAC chemoresistance independently of mutational status.

Self-renewing cancer stem cells drive tumor initiation and progression and represent a major target for therapeutic development. A study now shows that vanoxerine, a dopamine transporter antagonist, precisely inhibits this cell population in colorectal cancer, which leads to attenuation of tumor initiation and increased infiltration by immune cells.

Using CRISPR–Cas9 screens, we found that cancer-cell-intrinsic loss of Pip4k2c conferred liver-metastatic organotropism in melanoma through hypersensitization to insulin-mediated PI3K–AKT signaling via co-optation of distinct hepatic metabolic cues. Additionally, we showed that combinatorial therapies that abolished physiological and drug-induced changes in glucose and insulin levels specifically reduced liver metastasis.

Senescent cancer cells, which are characteristically present in tumors after genotoxic therapies, upregulate the immune checkpoint ligand programmed cell death 1 ligand 2 (PD-L2). We show that genetic or pharmacological ablation of PD-L2 prevents the accumulation of intratumoral senescent cells, reducing the recruitment of immunosuppressive myeloid cells and facilitating tumor clearance by T cells.

Papagiannakopoulos and colleagues discuss the roles of reactive oxygen species in cancer and the ways in which redox mechanisms may be exploited for cancer therapy.

Huang et al. show that ADAM9 loss upregulates PAI-1, promoting its interaction with KRAS and resulting in selective lysosomal degradation of KRAS. They also identify a small-molecule inhibitor of ADAM9 with therapeutic benefits in the context of PDAC.

Davies et al. show that skin PD-1⁺Vδ1⁺ cells show a transcriptional program of tissue residence and self-renewal, are functionally distinct from colocalized PD-1⁺CD8⁺ T cells and retain effector function that is derepressed by checkpoint blockade.

Izar and colleagues demonstrate that loss of Pip4k2c in melanoma cells promotes liver metastatic tropism driven by PI3K-AKT pathway activation in the insulin-rich liver milieu, which can be abrogated by inhibition of SGLT2 or a ketogenic diet.

Chaib et al. find that therapy-induced senescent cells have high programmed cell death 1 ligand 2 (PD-L2), contributing to recurrence. They show that PD-L2 blocking combined with chemotherapy is therapeutically beneficial because it reduces senescent cells and immunosuppressive cell recruitment.

Benoit and colleagues identify the dopamine transporter antagonist vanoxerine as a suppressor of G9a methyltransferase and show that treatment leads to cancer stem cell suppression and restoration of an immunoresponsive tumor microenvironment in CRC.

Manchado and colleagues combine CRISPR screening and transcriptomics to identify INPP5A as a dependency and therapeutic target in uveal melanoma driven by mutations in GNAQ/GNA11 and show that IP4 levels correlate with sensitivity to INPP5A loss.

Jin and colleagues show that myeloid cells in patients with colorectal cancer exhibit increased expression of SIRPA and that Sirpa deficiency on macrophages reprograms the tumor microenvironment and enhances the function of antitumor CD8⁺ T cells.

Bagley et al. conduct a phase 1 trial to study safety and tolerability of CAR T-EGFRvIII cells administered concomitantly with PD-1 inhibition via pembrolizumab in patients with glioblastoma and show tolerability, but without signs of efficacy.