Webinars

Immune responses to cancer immunotherapy outside the tumor

Matt Spitzer 3/16/2023

About the Video Webinar

In this educational webinar, Matthew Spitzer, PhD, reviews the current body of literature focused on answering the question “where do T cells get activated after cancer immunotherapy?” He also discusses his lab’s recent contribution in Cell (Rahim, Okholm, & Jones et al. 2023), which shows that successful T cell activation can be detected via peripheral blood immune profiling and that lymph node metastases can severely impair these processes. Read Teiko’s synopsis and highlights of Rahim, Okholm, & Jones et al. here.

About the Speaker

Matt Spitzer, PhD completed his training in Immunology at Stanford University in the laboratories of Garry Nolan and Edgar Engleman. There, he developed experimental and analytical methods to model the state of the immune system using high dimensional single-cell data. At Stanford, he also developed new strategies for inducing powerful immune responses against cancer.

Matt moved to UCSF in the summer of 2016 as a UCSF Parker Fellow and a Sandler Faculty Fellow and is now an Associate Professor in the Departments of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and Microbiology & Immunology and an investigator of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy. Matt is the scientific cofounder of Teiko Bio.

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Illustration. In the center is a grey mass labeled "tumor" under a magnifying glass. Inside the tumor are three grey cells all with "zzz" above them. Outside the magnifying glass (and therefore outside the tumor) in the four corners are different depictions. Top left shows three red cells and is labeled "novel T cell clones". Top right shows a lymph node with red T cell zones and the words "LN trafficking required". Bottom right shows two red T cells in a blood vessel labeled "LAG-3 and CD8+" with the words "peripheral biomarkers". Bottom left shows a spleen with the same grey, sleeping T cells. There's a red lightning bolt and the words "impaired systemic immune response in cancer".

Peripheral blood analysis is key to developing effective cancer immunotherapies

Although most research focuses on tumor-killing immune cells at the site of the tumor, new research increasingly demonstrates the value of studying circulating immune cells in peripheral blood to identify new therapeutic targets to enhance tumor-killing immune responses. We highlight recent publications with peripheral blood biomarkers and discuss recommendations for how to incorporate peripheral blood immune profiling into your drug development pipeline.