Unleashing the immune system to fight tumors—an approach enabled by immunotherapy—has led to remarkable outcomes in some cancer patients, but in many more, cancer cells evade the treatment and continue to spread. Now, a team led by researchers from Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified a gene expression pattern that human melanoma cells use to resist immunotherapy, and demonstrated a combination therapy approach that could overcome this resistance. The paper, published today in Cell, appears alongside a companion immunotherapy study led by a separate research team from Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital.
"With additional data, we hope that the methods and specific combination therapy identified in our study could have a real benefit for patients," said co-senior author Benjamin Izar, an instructor in medicine and melanoma oncologist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute. He and Aviv Regev, director of the Klarman Cell Observatory at the Broad Institute, professor of biology at MIT, and an HHMI investigator, are co-senior authors on the paper.