Susanna Fletcher Greer, Chief Scientific Officer at the V Foundation, shared on LinkedIn:
“Glioblastoma is one of the toughest cancers we face.Even with today’s best treatments, survival is often measured in months, not years. Researchers around the world are working to change that, and one promising area of discovery involves teaching the immune system to “eat” tumor cells.
Normally, immune cells called macrophages act like Pac-Man, gobbling up harmful invaders. But cancer cells are clever: they put up a “don’t eat me” signalon their surface, a protein called CD47, which tells macrophages to back off.
This new study from the V Foundation grantee Dr. Siddhartha Mitra | LinkedIn and team at University of Colorado Boulder asks a deceptively simple question: what happens if we block that signal?
By interfering with the CD47 “don’t eat me” pathway, the researchers found they could restore the macrophages’ ability to attack both glioblastoma and diffuse midline glioma cells.
Why this matters:
- Dr. Mitra’s team found a new way to harness the immune system in brain cancers that desperately need better options.
- Their findings suggest that pairing CD47-blocking strategies with existing treatments may help overcome tumor resistance.
- For patients, this research points to a future where the body’s own defenses play a bigger role in fighting these aggressive diseases.
This discovery could fuel next-generation therapies that don’t just shrink tumors, but retrain the immune system to keep fighting, finally offering hope in cancers where options have been scarce.
Dr. Mitra is now working to map out the exact “recipes” that turn macrophages into the most powerful cancer fighters. That means designing smarter combination therapies, like radiation + CD47 blockade, that can move from mouse models to clinical trials. It’s early days, but the path is clear: give the immune system the right “meals,” and it may finally have the strength to take down these aggressive brain cancers.
Read this incredible paper here: Differential phagocytosis induces diverse macrophage activation states in malignant gliomas | Journal for ImmunoTherapy of Cancer and read about the Mitra lab at Siddhartha Mitra | Profiles | School of Medicine | University of Colorado.”
More insights from Susanna Fletcher Greer.