Finding antitumor T cells in a patient’s own cancer
In a paper recently published in Clinical Cancer Research, investigators in the lab of Daniel Powell, PhD, at the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, demonstrated for the first time that a T cell activation molecule can be used as a biomarker to identify rare antitumor T cells in human cancers. The molecule, CD137, is a protein that is not normally found on the surface of resting T cells but its expression is induced when the T cell is activated…