Researchers at the VIB-KU Leuven Center for Cancer Biology have identified a potential target for cancer immunotherapy. The team, led by Professor Massimiliano Mazzone found that the CDA gene is among the top upregulated metabolic genes in immunotherapy-resistant tumors. Inhibiting this gene through pharmacologic or genetic intervention led to better T-cell infiltration, increasing effectiveness of immunotherapy in a type of pancreatic cancer called PDAC.
The results of the study have been published in Nature Cancer . At present, immunotherapy treatments, including adoptive T-cell transfer, cancer vaccines and immune checkpoint blockade (ICB), represent a promising option for cancer patients. Despite the high response rates with prolonged survival in subsets of melanoma , lung, and renal cancer patients, ICB struggles to show clinical benefit in several other tumors such as in most of colorectal cancer and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) patients.
PDAC is one of the most aggressive and lethal cancers with an overall 5-year survival rate of 9%. In Belgium alone, pancreatic cancer is the 9 th most common cancer with 2242 diagnoses in 2021. Most patients are diagnosed at advanced stages with distant organ metastases, resulting in less than 20% of patients being eligible for surgery at the time of diagnosis.
Most therapies, including ICB, are not effective and many patients who undergo surgery ultimately relapse. A team led by Professor Massimiliano Mazzone at the VIB-KU .
