Lecture 34: Cancer immunology

Question 1

What immune effectors are likely to be involved in eliminating cancer cells in healthy people?

Answer 1

• Antigen presenting cells
• Helper T cells
• Cytotoxic T cells
• NK cells
• B cells

Question 2

What are the methods of detecting and measuring immune responses in cancer?

Answer 2

• Morphology based, protein based and RNA based methods.

Question 3

Does the type of cancer change the inflammatory response?

Answer 3

Yes, different cancer types tend to have different levels of immune responses

Question 4

How effective is the immune system at beating cancer?

Answer 4

Immune activation in cancer only improves patient outcome if there is also high ‘mutational burden’

Question 5

What do cancer cells express that are important in immune activation?

Answer 5

Cancer/testis antigens, they are expressed aberrantly in tumours

Question 6

How does cancer evade the immune system?

Answer 6

• Activate immune checkpoints
• Reduce HLA expression
• Reduced immunogenicity
• Mutation (resistant variants)
• Release inhibitors (i.e cytokine TGF-beta)
• Activate inhibitory T cells
• Reducing amino acid availability

Question 7

What is a novel approach to cancer immunotherapy?

Answer 7

The use of immune checkpoint inhibitors to prevent interaction between checkpoint molecules on the cancer and immune cells, that would normally stop cancer recognition.

Question 8

What is the car T-cell approach?

Answer 8

1) T cell collection
2) T cell transfection
3) T-cell adoptive transfer