Science spotlight: Boosting immunotherapy by counteracting Tregs in tumor-draining lymph nodes and more

MIT and Genentech teams are the latest to point to modulation of specific immunosuppressive cell types as a path to increasing the efficacy of next-generation immuno-oncology agents whose targets have not yet secured clinical proof of concept.

In a Nature Communcations study, the MIT authors showed that depleting or inhibiting regulatory T cells (Tregs) via an anti-CD4 mAb or an anti-CTLA-4 mAb, respectively, increased responses to a 4-1BB agonist mAb fused to the ectodomain of the collagen-binding protein LAIR1, in a syngeneic, poorly immunogenic mouse model of melanoma. The authors proposed that Tregs in tumor-draining lymph nodes dampen the T cell priming required to maximize responses to immune agonists...