Welcome to our Monthly Journal Club! Each month I post a paper or two that I have read and find interesting. I use this as a forum for open discussion about the paper in question. Anyone can participate in the journal club, and provide comments/critiques on the paper by leaving a comment below. I picked this month’s paper because it describes a potentially powerful new target to treat a variety of cancers using the immune system (immunotherapy). Also, I am (in part) a cancer researcher working on brain-immune interactions. Therefore, I found this paper to be very relevant to my work. The paper we are discussing is titled “CD24 signalling through macrophage Siglec-10 is a target for cancer immunotherapy” by Irving Weissman & colleagues at Stanford University.

Cancer is a complex and heterogenous disease. How can we hope to tackle this devastating illness to save lives? The classic approach of surgery followed by chemo/radiotherapy treatment is dangerous, not very effective, and can leave lasting damage that persists for the patient’s entire life. In recent years, a new strategy which harnesses the power of the immune system (immunotherapy) has gained substantial traction as a novel approach for eliminating cancer. The immune system is finely tuned to identify and kill foreign invaders (e.g., bacteria, viruses) and malignant or damaged cells (e.g., cancer cells). To do this effectively, the immune system must be able to identify ‘self’ vs ‘non-self’ in order to keep our healthy cells and tissues safe (i.e., autoimmunity). One way in which the immune system is regulated is through interactions between proteins expressed by target cells and those expressed by cells of the immune system (both lymphoid and myeloid cells). Some of these proteins enhance the immune response (e.g., MHC-II, CD28), while others drastically dampen immune activity (i.e., they are ‘don’t eat me’ signals, like PD-L1).