Giovanni Fucà, Medical Director, Early Global Development, Oncology R&D at AstraZeneca, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Some breakthroughs in cancer immunology may come from not studying cancer at all.
But from watching how other diseases outmanoeuvre the immune system.
A new Nature Immunology study maps tuberculosis granulomas with striking spatial resolution, and the parallels with solid tumours are hard to ignore.
A hypoxic, immune-excluded core shaped by myeloid cells within a metabolically hostile niche.
Key observations:
• TB granulomas split into two metabolic worlds:
a normoxic, macrophage-rich zone and a hypoxic ring where T cells nearly disappear
• Hypoxia drives immunosuppressive macrophage programs (HIF-1, GLUT1, IL6, VEGFA)
• High-burden granulomas resemble hypoxic tumour cores: dense myeloid niches, reduced antigen presentation, impaired T cell engagement
What’s fascinating is the convergence.
TB granulomas are built by infection, not malignancy, yet they land on similar design principles:
hypoxia → metabolic rewiring → immune exclusion → persistence
From an oncology perspective, this feels like a natural experiment. A system where immune escape evolves outside cancer, but lands on comparable spatial and metabolic solutions.
It suggests we may be underestimating what infectious disease biology can teach us about immune-excluded tumours.
Some of the clues may already exist not in cancer biopsies, but in granulomas.”
Title: The immunometabolic topography of cellular organization and bacterial control in tuberculosis granulomas
Authors: Erin F. McCaffrey, Alea C. Delmastro, Isobel Fitzhugh, Jolene S. Ranek, Sarah Douglas, Joshua M. Peters, Christine Camacho Fullaway, Marc Bosse, Candace C. Liu, Craig Gillen, Noah F. Greenwald, Sarah Anzick, Craig Martens, Seth Winfree, Yunhao Bai, Cameron Sowers, Mako Goldston, Alex Kong, Potchara Boonrat, Carolyn L. Bigbee, Roopa Venugopalan, Pauline Maiello, Edwin Klein, Mark A. Rodgers, Charles A. Scanga, Philana Ling Lin, Sean C. Bendall, Denise E. Kirschner, Sarah M. Fortune, Bryan D. Bryson, J. Russell Butler, Joshua T. Mattila, JoAnne L. Flynn, Michael Angelo
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