Cancer Counterstrike

As well as fighting foreign bugs that invade the body, a person’s immune cells can ferret out and destroy cancerous cells arising within the body itself. Cancer is a tricky beast, however, and the cells can employ a variety of nefarious tactics to suppress the immune system and avoid detection and destruction. One such trick is the production of an enzyme called ART1 – shown in green in these human lung cancer cells. ART1 catalyses the modification of a protein receptor on the surface of the tumour-fighting immune cells that ultimately causes the cells to die. Encouragingly, researchers have found that blocking ART1 activity in mice with cancer can unleash the animals’ immune systems, promote infiltration of immune cells into tumours, and stunt tumour growth. These promising results provide impetus for the further development and testing of anti-ART1 medications that might one day be used to boost cancer-fighting cells in patients.

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 Sumit Mukherjee, from work by Erik Wennerberg and Sumit Mukherjee, and colleagues
• Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, NY, USA
• Image copyright held by the original authors
• Research published in Science Translational Medicine, March 2022