Type 2 cytokines for durable cancer remission, drugging GTPases: BioCentury’s Science Spotlight

Researchers from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) and Yale University published a pair of Nature papers identifying the type 2 cytokine IL-4 as a contributor to exhausted T cells. Type 2 cytokines are essential for killing extracellular pathogens, supporting tissue repair and managing allergic responses, but their contribution to antitumor immunity has been less well understood than that of type 1 cytokines.

In the first article, the authors made a single-cell CAR T atlas from 695,819 pre-infusion CAR T cells at baseline and after CAR-specific stimulation from 82 pediatric patients with acute lymphocytic leukemia, and found elevated secretion of type 2 cytokines, including IL-4, in CAR T infusion products was associated with long-term remission eight years after treatment. The authors reported an average of 8% type 2 cells in CAR T products from patients with long-term remissions, versus <2% for those with short-term responses...