Encouraging progress in immunometabolism
For the final postcard in our 2020 summer mini-series on the potential of immunometabolism in oncology R&D, we’re taking an in-depth look at the ways in which metabolic programming can overcome immunosuppression in the tumour microenvironment (TME), as well as looking at additional novel ways in which the fitness of T cells can be impacted.
We’ve already covered glutaminase, arginine, p38 and others, yet there are other metabolic effects to consider too, as we discover in our latest expert interview. In the penultimate postcard, we looked at mitochondrial phenotypes and how they can impact both mitochondrial and T cell fitness, which are important aspects in making adoptive cell therapy (ACT) based approaches such as TILs and CAR-T cell therapies more effective.
Deep thoughts on immunometabolism and how it can impact antitumour response
These themes show up yet again, but in a rather different context because T cell fitness can also impact immune checkpoint blockade, oncogenic targeting, as well as transcriptional and epigenetic approaches.
As much as we have been slowing building up the evidence during this series, in the finale it’s now time to kick up things up a notch or two and draw some unifying ideas together.
We accomplish this feat with a rising young star in this particular niche, Dr Ping-Chih Ho, who is at the University of Lausanne.
He kindly spoke to BSB about his pioneering and prolific research, some of the critical questions he has sought to answer, plus what he sees are important future directions to consider in metabolism research.
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