Kelsey Bennion: Another piece to the puzzle of how CD8 T cells make their own off switch along the autocrine signaling axis
Kelsey Bennion, PhD Candidate at
“The second first-author publication from my PhD at Emory University is out now in Nature Portfolio Communications.
Excited to share another piece to the puzzle of how CD8 T cells make their own off switch along the Fgl2/FcgRIIB autocrine signaling axis! This paper is an update to the work I presented in last year’s Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) Presidential Session.
These data suggest a model whereby a CD8 T cell expressing FcgRIIB is poised for deletion but does not undergo cell death until driven to also secrete Fgl2.
More broadly, we are excited to learn that a CD8 T cell can both express the receptor and secrete its ligand to regulate CD8 T cell immunity. These findings are paradigm shifting as we often think of exhausted CD8 T cells as functionally inert.
Here, we show a way by which they actively thwart the T cell response to promote a return to immune homeostasis.
Understanding/targeting this pathway may hold promise in the harnessing of T cells in immune checkpoint and T-cell based therapies in cancer immunotherapy and in the treatment of other diseases.
THANK YOU to all co-authors on this work for their time and insights. I’m incredibly grateful for the support of my mentor Mandy Ford during my time in Emory’s Cancer Biology PhD program.
We are also appreciative of the patients of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University and their families, to our funding sources especially NCI Center for Cancer Research for my F31 and F99 awards, and to the scientists who helped make our science better by publicly depositing their data.”
Source: Kelsey Bennion/LinkedIn