Recently, a research team led by Prof. XIAO Liuling from the College of Basic Medicine, Chongqing Medical University, in collaboration with Mr. YI Qing's group at Cornell Medical College, published a study titled "Adoptively Transferred Tumour-Specific IL-9-Producing Cytotoxic CD8 T Cells Activate Host CD4 T Cells to Control Tumours with Antigen Loss" in Nature Cancer. This work provides novel insights into suppressing tumour cell recurrence through immunotherapy.
The research team discovered that a subset of CD8+ T cells capable of secreting interleukin-9, namely Tc9 cells, can produce high levels of IL-24 upon tumour infiltration. This attracts dendritic cells (DCs), particularly conventional type 2 DCs (cDC2), to activate host effector CD4+ T cells and control the growth of ALV tumours in mouse models. The Tc9 cell-induced host effector CD4+ T cell response via the IL-24-DC circuit not only provides a novel biomarker for prognostic evaluation but also offers a theoretical foundation for clinical translation based on Tc9 adoptive therapy or IL-24-targeted treatment. Furthermore, it suggests that activating host effector CD4+ T cells may represent a highly promising approach to enhance the anti-tumour efficacy of adoptive cell therapy (ACT) against human cancers.
XIAO Liuling: Professor and doctoral supervisor. Graduated from Fudan University in 2017 with a PhD in Science. From 2017 to 2023, worked as a postdoctoral fellow and associate researcher at the Houston Methodist Institute affiliated with Cornell Medical School in the United States; joined Chongqing Medical University in December 2023 as a distinguished professor and researcher.
(Translated by AI)
