Advance in Immunotherapy of Epithelial Tumors

All tumors contain mutations, some of which produce proteins with surface regions (epitopes) that are novel. Some T cells recognize these “nonself” epitopes as foreign and mount a feeble attack. In adoptive cell therapy, T cells that are trying to attack a patient's tumor are identified, grown in large numbers, and reinfused into the patient. This and related approaches have yielded some success with melanoma and lymphoma. But, in developed nations, 90% of life-threatening human malignancies are epithelial tumors; whether adoptive cell therapy is effective against such tumors is unclear.

Now, a team from the NIH reports tumor regression in a 43-year-old woman with widely metastatic cholangiocarcinoma that was unresponsive to conventional the…