Increasingly dense cell clusters in growing tumors convert blood vessels into fiber-filled channels. This makes immune cells less effective, as findings by researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Strasbourg suggest. Their research is published in Matrix Biology.

It was almost ten years ago that researchers first observed that tumors occurring in different cancers—including colorectal cancer, breast cancer and melanoma—exhibit channels leading from the surface to the inside of the cell cluster. But how these channels form, and what functions they perform, long remained a mystery.

Through a series of elaborate and detailed experiments, the research groups led by Viola Vogel, Professor of Applied Mechanobiology at ETH Zurich, and Gertraud Orend from the University of Strasbourg have found possible answers to these questions. There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that these channels, which the researchers have dubbed tumor tracks, were once blood vessels.

Researchers have found that an activated form of the hunger hormone ghrelin can help people with heart failure by increasing the heart’s pump capacity.

In a Phase II trial led by researchers from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, adding ipilimumab to a neoadjuvant, or pre-surgical, combination of nivolumab plus platinum-based chemotherapy, resulted in a major pathologic response (MPR) in half of all treated patients with early-stage, resectable non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).

New findings from the NEOSTAR trial, published today in Nature Medicine, provide further support for neoadjuvant immunotherapy-based treatment as an approach to reduce viable tumor at surgery and to improve outcomes in NSCLC. The combination also was associated with an increase in immune cell infiltration and a favorable gut microbiome composition.

The current study reports on the latest two arms of the NEOSTAR trial, evaluating neoadjuvant nivolumab plus chemotherapy (double combination) and neoadjuvant ipilimumab plus nivolumab and chemotherapy (triple combination). Both treatment arms met their prespecified primary endpoint boundaries of six or more patients achieving MPR, defined as 10% or less residual viable tumor (RVT) in the resected tumor specimen at surgery, a candidate surrogate endpoint of improved survival outcomes from prior studies.