Matt Kaiser: This research is about a weird but fascinating way cancer cells can escape the immune system
Matt Kaiser, Head of Major Initiatives, Discovery Research at Wellcome Trust, shared a post on Linkedin about a recent paper by Hideki Ikeda et al. published in Nature Magazine:
“New research out this week!
This one’s on a weird but fascinating way cancer cells can escape the immune system.
Tumours are energy hungry, and it’s already known that cancer cells can acquire mitochondria from neighbouring host cells to help power their growth. Mitochondria are the ‘battery packs’ of cells, generating energy for the cell to function. Tumours also thrive in environments where they are left unchecked by the immune system.
A new paper in Nature Magazine takes a surprising step forward in understanding one way this happens. The team showed that the cancer cells can capture mitochondria from incoming immune T cells, which would normally be primed to mount an anti-tumour response.
But not only does the cancer cell steal the healthy mitochondria, it exchanges them for its own damaged mitochondria via ‘tunnelling nanotubes’ that form a bridge between cells.
And in a final coup de grace, the damaged mitochondria from cancer cells are studded with a molecule that prevents them from being broken up and recycled by the cellular machinery of the T cell, so they hang around doing their damage.
This swap allows the cancer cells to carry on powering its own growth whilst, at the same time, hampering an immune attack.
This also means that immunotherapies, which rely on stimulating an effective anti-tumour response, work poorly in these situations. So understanding this mechanism of cancer immune evasion may open up new ideas about how to improve cancer immunotherapies in the future.
Great work!”
“Immune evasion through mitochondrial transfer in the tumour microenvironment”
Authors: Hideki Ikeda, Katsushige Kawase, Tatsuya Nishi, Masahito Kawazu, Yosuke Togashi et al.
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