Exposing Tumours' Tricks

Tumours have an array of tactics for avoiding detection and destruction by the immune system. They can, for example, display proteins on the surfaces of their cells that tell immune cells not to destroy them. They can also release a soup of immunosuppressive molecules that dampen the activity of patrolling immune cells. And, as has been discovered recently, they can produce a protein called CCR2 that inhibits the infiltration and maturation of dendritic cells — a type of messenger cell that alerts other immune cells and rallies them into action. The tumour on the left (green) is expressing CCR2, while the one on the right is not and has far greater numbers of infiltrating immune cells (red) as a result. The good news is that by identifying these various immune-avoidance ploys researchers are better informed for finding novel ways to counteract them.

Written by Ruth Williams

Ruth Williams

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Ruth is a freelance science journalist based in the US. She's a regular correspondent for The Scientist, and her work has appeared in The Lancet, Nature, Scientific American Mind, BBC Focus and elsewhere. Twitter @rooph

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• Image by Xue-Yan He, Egeblad lab, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Journal of Experimental Medicine, July 2020