The fatal alliance of cancer and T cells: How pancreatic tumor cells gather immunosuppressive T cells

Evelin Grage-Griebenow; Heiner Schäfer; Susanne Sebens

doi:10.4161/onci.29382

The fatal alliance of cancer and T cells: How pancreatic tumor cells gather immunosuppressive T cells

Oncoimmunology. 2014 Jun 25:3:e29382. doi: 10.4161/onci.29382. eCollection 2014.

Authors

Evelin Grage-Griebenow¹, Heiner Schäfer², Susanne Sebens¹

Affiliations

¹ Group of Inflammatory Carcinogenesis; Institute for Experimental Medicine; Kiel, Germany.
² Laboratory of Molecular Gastroenterology & Hepatology; Department of Internal Medicine I; Kiel, Germany.

Abstract

Immune evasion is a hallmark of cancer. We recently identified the adhesion molecule L1CAM as biomarker of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) associated with poor prognosis. During inflammation-associated carcinogenesis, L1CAM drives the enrichment of highly immunosuppressive CD4⁺CD25^-CD69⁺ T cells. Thus, L1CAM may serve as a target in immunomodulatory therapy for PDAC.

Keywords: L1CAM; immune evasion; pancreatic cancer; tumor microenvironment; tumor-associated inflammation.