Q&A: Suzanne Topalian on immune therapies.

The Intratumoral Balance between Metabolic and Immunologic Gene Expression Is Associated with Anti-PD-1 Response in Patients with Renal Cell Carcinoma.

Pretreatment tumor PD-L1 expression has been shown to correlate with response to anti-PD-1/PD-L1 therapies. Yet, most patients with PD-L1(+) tumors do not respond to treatment. The current study was undertaken to investigate mechanisms underlying the failure of PD-1-targeted therapies in patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma (RCC) whose tumors express PD-L1. Formalin-fixed, paraffin-embed...

Patients with Metastatic Melanoma Receiving Generation of Antitumor Reactivity in Impact of Cytokine Administration on the

PD-L1 expression in the Merkel cell carcinoma microenvironment: association with inflammation, Merkel cell polyomavirus and overall survival.

Merkel cell carcinoma (MCC) is a lethal, virus-associated cancer that lacks effective therapies for advanced disease. Agents blocking the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway have demonstrated objective, durable tumor regressions in patients with advanced solid malignancies and efficacy has been linked to PD-L1 expression in the tumor microenvironment. To investigate whether MCC might be a target for PD-1/PD-L1 ...

Meeting report: The future of preclinical mouse models in melanoma treatment is now.

On October 17th, 2012 a group of 28 basic researchers and physician scientists met at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia, PA to initiate detailed discussions on the current status and future prospects of preclinical studies in human melanoma, focusing on the mouse as an experimental system. The goal of this meeting, organized by Drs. Glenn Merlino (NCI), Terry Van Dyke (NCI) and Meenhard Herl...

Revelation of a cryptic major histocompatibility complex class II-restricted tumor epitope in a novel RNA-processing enzyme.

CD4+ T-cell responses against human tumor antigens are a potentially critical component of the antitumor immune response. Molecular methods have been devised for rapidly identifying MHC class II-restricted tumor antigens and elucidating the recognized epitopes. We describe here the identification of neo-poly(A) polymerase (neo-PAP), a novel RNA processing enzyme overexpressed in a variety of hu...