Beyond T cell counts

While strategies to increase the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors have largely been focused on boosting overall T cell count in the tumor microenvironment, researchers at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI) found that antigen specificity of the T cells must also be taken into account, and the team plans to form a spinout to develop the findings.

In a December letter published in Nature Medicine, the researchers found that in high-grade serous ovarian cancer and microsatellite-stable colorectal cancer, there was high variability in the proportion of intratumoral CD8⁺ T cells that recognize and respond to tumors. ...