T lymphocyte    Source: Dr Triche, NCI

It’s time for an update on cytokines as there is a lot going on here across both academia and industry.

While the clinical proof of concept has been demonstrated for IL-2 with FDA approval going back to 1992, there’s still much that we don’t know when it comes to the telephone directory containing many of the others.

There’s quite a few questions that can be asked:

  • Which ones might be best in which tumour types?
  • What about timing, dosing, and sequencing?
  • Which early combinations look promising in terms of unleashing the T lymphocytes?

After all, let’s not forget that some cytokines will induce negative immunosuppression, while others might induce variable effects depending on what they encounter in the tumour microenvironment.  It’s certainly a lot more complicated than many people truly realise.

There’s also the much under-rated potential to combine cytokines with other approaches such as immune agonists in order to jumpstart the colder tumours.

In this latest update, we take a look at five very different approaches and see how much progress is being made with alternative forms of immune modulation – the resulting conclusions might well surprise quite a few readers!

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