Yan Leyfman, Medical Oncologist, Co-Founder and Executive Director of MedNews Week, shared a post on LinkedIn about a paper by Xiao Huang et al. published in Immunity by Cell Press:
“A paradigm shift in how we think about Tregs in cancer.
For years, regulatory T cells (Tregs) have been viewed as uniformly bad actors in solid tumors. Colorectal cancer breaks that rule.
New insights from MSKCC researchers reveal functionally distinct Treg populations in CRC:
- IL-10⁺ Tregs → restrain pro-tumor inflammation and associate with better outcomes
- IL-10⁻ Tregs → drive tumor progression and link to worse prognosis
Removing the ‘wrong’ Tregs can accelerate tumor growth, while targeting the pro-tumoral subset leads to regression—highlighting why indiscriminate Treg depletion may backfire.
Similar Treg programs appear across other barrier tissue cancers, suggesting broader relevance.
Takeaway: The future of immunotherapy may lie in precision immune modulation—selectively targeting harmful immune subsets while preserving protective ones.”
Title: Opposing functions of distinct regulatory T cell subsets in colorectal cancer
Authors: Xiao Huang, Dan Feng, Sneha Mitra, Emma S. Andretta, Nima B. Hooshdaran, Aazam P. Ghelani, Eric Y. Wang, Joe N. Frost, Victoria R. Lawless, Aparna Vancheswaran, Qingwen Jiang, Cheryl Mai, Karuna Ganesh, Christina S. Leslie, Alexander Y. Rudensky
You can read the full article in Immunity by Cell Press.
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