The next challenge in cancer immunotherapy: controlling T-cell traffic to the tumor.

One of the steps that limits the efficacy of T-cell-based immunotherapy of cancer is T-cell access to the tumor. We recently showed that several chemotherapeutic drugs induce intratumoral expression of chemokines that attract effector T cells. Moreover, in a cohort of patients with melanoma who had been treated with dacarbazine, one of the most frequently used chemotherapies for metastatic melanoma, tumor response to the treatment correlated with intratumoral expression of T-cell-attracting chemokines and with T-cell infiltration. These findings reveal the possibility of developing novel systemic strategies aimed at improving T-cell homing to tumors. Such strategies, used alone or in combination with adoptive T-cell therapies or therapeutic cancer vaccines, may prove to be more efficient in prolonging patient survival. ©2012 AACR