Samra Turajlić, Director at CRUK Manchester Institute, shared a post on LinkedIn about a recent article by Naomi van den Berg et al, adding:
“Very pleased to share a new preprint from our lab, now online:
This perspective was driven and led by Naomi van den Berg who joined the group earlier this year with a background in mathematics and ecology. Fresh perspectives are always good and she challenged us to share observations that we find hard to reconcile.
One paradox in particular became the heart of this work:
Why do some cancers with high immune infiltration – such as kidney cancer, uveal melanoma and gliomas – have worse prognosis, when in most cancers more immune cells = better outcomes?
Naomi van den Berg and the team traced a common thread: these tumours tend to arise in some of the most metabolically intense tissues in the body.
From this emerges the Immunometabolic Gatekeeping Hypothesis – that a tissue’s baseline metabolic architecture may pre-determine whether immune cells can function or fail, long before tumour genetics take over. Some tissues may be metabolically ‘primed’ to exhaust immunity even before transformation begins.
The perspective synthesises insights across:
- tumour metabolism
- immune exhaustion
- stromal and tissue ecology
- hereditary cancer syndromes
- clinical oncology
- Peto’s paradox and cross-species cancer resistance
- All converging on one idea: metabolism may be an upstream gatekeeper of anti-tumour immunity.
Huge congratulations to Naomi van den Berg or leading this work so impressively so early in her cancer research journey, and many thanks to co-authors Matouš Elphick, Kevin Mulder, Omar Bouricha, and Omid Sadeghi-Alavijeh and Naomi’s co-supervisor Xiao Fu.
Naomi is part of the award-winning Manifest Team.”
Title: Immunometabolic Gatekeeping: Reconciling Peto’s & the T-cell Infiltration Prognostic Paradox
Authors: Naomi Iris van den Berg, Matouš Elphick, Kevin Mulder, Omar Bouricha, Omid Sadeghi-Alavijeh, Xiao Fu, Samra Turajlic
Read the Full Article on arXiv
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