Decoding Immune Cell Dialogue to Predict Immunotherapy Responses
An interdisciplinary team, including scientists from PHURI, has developed a pioneering method to decode cellular communication. This innovation sheds new light on the hidden conversations between cells and opens the door to more effective cancer treatments. By applying this method, the researchers have shown how it can deepen our understanding of novel immunotherapies that harness the patient’s own immune system to combat cancer.
There is a lack of reliable predictive methods that can determine how a patient will respond to certain immunotherapies and understanding how immune cells communicate with each other may be the key to understanding the differences.
To detect and destroy infections and cancer cells, immune cells have a complex system of “talking" to each other. Technologies have been developed to decipher the interactions between these cells, but they have long processing times, are expensive, and are usually limited to predefined cell types. A team of researchers from the Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH), the Max Delbrück Center, the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), the Heidelberg Institute for Stem Cell Technology and Experimental Medicine (HI-STEM), and Queen Mary University of London have created a new technology called Interact-omics that can “listen in” on this immune cell dialogue.
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