The immune system is constantly on the lookout for diseased cells. Every cell in our body has signals on their surface that reach out to immune cells, letting them know if everything is ok, or if the cell is unhealthy.
Signals from diseased cells will cause the immune system to attack and kill those faulty cells. But in many lung cancers, the cancer cells lose about half of those signals to the immune system. This lets the cancer cells hide from the immune attacks, and allows the cancer to keep growing.
Researchers have developed a computational toolset to help investigate how many of these signals to the immune cells are left on a cancer cell, based on DNA sequencing information. Hopefully this will help us develop more focused immune therapy in the future.
First author: Rachel Rosenthal
Corresponding authors: Professor Charles Swanton and Dr Nicholas McGranahan
Research paper: http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(17)31185-6