WEHI Wednesday Seminar hosted by Professor Kate Sutherland
Dr Jin Ng
ACRF Cancer Biology & Stem Cells division – Cancer Research & Treatments Theme -WEHI
An unconventional relationship: γδ T cells and small cell lung cancer (SCLC)
Davis Auditorium
Join via SLIDO enter code #WEHIWednesday
Including Q&A session
Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) is the most aggressive form of lung cancer with less than 6% of patients surviving to 5 years. While immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) has revolutionised cancer patient outcomes, most SCLC patients lack durable responses to ICB. These poor ICB responses are due to the epigenetic silencing of MHC-I, paucity of infiltrating effector CD8 T cells, and lack of PD-L1 expression. As such, innate or innate-like immune cells that do not rely on this MHC-I/peptide recognition axis may be exploited as a source of anti-cancer responses.
Through extensive multi-modal analyses of human SCLC patient biospecimens, γδ T cells were identified as a population of immune cells that had high cytotoxic potential and were prognostic of overall survival. γδ T cells are unconventional T cells that bridge the innate and adaptive immune system, having the ability to directly kill target cells independent of MHC-I/peptide recognition. Importantly, emerging studies have identified γδ T as a source of anti-tumour responses, particularly in cancers of epithelial origin with compromised MHC function and expression. As such, this seminar hopes to highlight the utility of γδ T cells in mediating anti-cancer responses in SCLC and provides a framework for future endeavours to investigate the efficacy of emerging γδ T cell focussed therapies (e.g., adoptive transfer).
Jin completed his PhD in Biological Sciences at the University of Auckland (UoA), New Zealand. Following his PhD, he joined Professor Rod Dunbar’s laboratory (UoA) researching the antigen cross-presentation pathway towards improving the efficacy of melanoma vaccines. He joined Professor Kate Sutherland’s laboratory at WEHI in 2020, where his research focusses on the molecular subtyping of SCLC (Clinical Cancer Research, 2024) and immune/tumour cell interactions for better precision medicine approaches.
All welcome!
