Conference: Keystone Symposia-Immune Regulation in Autoimmunity and Cancer, March 26-30, 2017, Whistler, British Columbia, Canada.
Conference Highlight: The meeting was mainly focused on understanding the immune mechanisms in autoimmunity and cancer. It was innovative in bringing together basic immunologists investigating mechanisms of tolerance in disease settings like autoimmunity and cancer in both patients and experimental models.
Conference Article: This meeting involved speaker talks from lead scientists in the field, short talks from conference participants, and poster presentations. It covered the pathways in immunity and tolerance that lead to loss of immunological control, dysregulated immune responses and chronic inflammatory diseases or tumour evasion. Conference participants from preclinical, translational and clinical research backgrounds were involved in conversations with new insights into understanding the current progress in the field with emphasis on mechanisms that are driving autoimmune diseases and tumour evasion. Understanding checkpoints in autoimmunity and immune cell tolerance is important for delivering therapies to patients with autoimmune disease and cancer, and this meeting provided a platform for the union of clinical experience and experimental research. Attendees learned about the impact of targeted immune-based therapeutics on clinical outcome and improving the research strategies to develop new therapies.
Several talks from lead scientists showed promising progress with immune checkpoint therapies, including anti-CTLA-4, anti-PD-1 and anti-PD-L1, which led to significant clinical responses in cancer patients. Dr. Padmanee Sharma’s lab at MD Anderson Cancer Center conducted pre-surgical and tissue based clinical trials in patients with bladder cancer, melanoma and prostate cancer. They identified the ICOS/ICOSL pathway as relevant for anti-tumour immune responses in the setting of anti-CTLA-4 therapy. In addition, they showed resistance mechanisms including expression of other immune inhibitory pathways, such as VISTA, and loss of the IFNγ signaling pathway in tumour cells. A talk from Jeffrey Bluestone from University of California San Francisco emphasized the Treg instability in the disease settings like autoimmunity. He talked about the chromatin modifications in the Treg cell lineage. In addition, he focused on new developments on the cell based Treg cell therapies to induce tolerance.
In summary, this conference brought together recent advances in understanding the mechanisms behind autoimmunity and immune evasion of cancer, and therapeutics to target them.