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Detailed maps of the immune cells around tumours could suggest therapeutic targets, identify markers that could be used to select patients for a given therapy, and predict the best time to start treatment, according to two studies released on 4 May. The papers, published in Cell, reflect a growing appreciation that a tumour’s response to treatment is guided by the immune cells that amass at its borders and invade its core. “These papers are really important,” says Nick Haining, an immunologist and oncologist at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. “They put a flag in the ground, saying: here’s the technology that makes it possible, and there’s way more stuff here to learn than you would have thought.” One team, led by systems biologist Bernd Bodenmiller of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, mapped two kinds of immune cell — T cells and macrophages — in a form of kidney cancer. Both can either mount or suppress an immune attack on a tumour, depending on the proteins they express. The researchers examined samples from 73 people with kidney cancer, along with 5 samples of healthy tissue. They evaluated the expression of 29 proteins used to characterize macrophages, and 23 to characterize T cells. They found that patients with a particular combination of T cells and macrophages also tended to have fast-progressing cancers. Another study, led by oncologist Miriam Merad of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, compared normal lung tissue and blood with early-stage lung cancer tumours. It found that the young tumours had already begun to alter immune cells in their vicinity. This means that therapies that target the immune system should be used against early-stage cancers, says Merad. Neither study will change cancer treatment on its own. Haining likens the studies to the first papers to report the genome sequences of tumours — an effort that led to international collaborations and thousands of sequences. “That’s what we need in order to understand the biology,” he says. ■

Cell maps reveal fresh details on how the immune system fights cancer