What is it about?
In this paper, we have shown for the first time that chemotherapy-treated cancer cells undergo immunogenic cell death or immunogenic apoptosis that resembles or mimicks responses of a cell infected with a bacteria or virus. Thus, we have revealed that anticancer therapy can co-opt for evolutionarily hard-wired anti-pathogen defense response pathways to convey the 'dangerous' status of cancer cells to host immune system thereby invoking a neutrophil-driven anticancer reaction.
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Why is it important?
We provide thus-far the most comprehensive analysis of bio-mimicry for cancer cells dying following therapeutic cytotoxic stress, wherein they are mimicking host response to bacterial or viral infection. This study is important since it reveals that the pathways for communicating danger to the immune system have an evolutionary basis and while the finer features of the pathway may be contextually variable yet the core is largely defined by evolutionarily conserved systems.
Perspectives
This study is my most cherished accomplishment due to the sheer amounts of multi-disciplinary approaches exploited here for reaching the relevant conclusions. A number of parallel and diverse analyses were executed in vitro, in vivo and in silico to gain both mechanistic and evolutionary knowledge on this unique bio-mimicry based pathway demonstrated by dying cancer cells.
Abhishek Garg
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Pathogen response-like recruitment and activation of neutrophils by sterile immunogenic dying cells drives neutrophil-mediated residual cell killing, Cell Death and Differentiation, February 2017, Nature,
DOI: 10.1038/cdd.2017.15.
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