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Scientists at the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) reveal how T cells “decide” their fate in fighting infections like COVID-19, paving the way for improved treatments for infections, cancer, and autoimmune diseases.

Infection, autoimmunity and cancer account for 40 percent of deaths worldwide. In a Cell Reports paper, ISB researchers detail how the human immune system works in common ways across diseases – findings that offer promising avenues for exploring multi-disease therapeutic strategies.

In a breakthrough discovery that changes how we understand T cells and with implications of how we can better engineer custom immune responses to fight disease, Institute for Systems Biology researchers showed that the different disease-fighting functions of different T cells are determined by the genetically encoded T-cell receptor sequence that are unique to those cells.

In a just-published paper in the journal Nature, a collaborative team of researchers from ISB, UCLA, PACT Pharma, and beyond analyzed T-cell responses in melanoma patients who were treated with different immune checkpoint inhibitors, and how those responses evolved over time.

Scientists for the first time have used CRISPR to substitute a gene to treat patients with cancer. The remarkable findings were published in the journal Nature and presented at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) 2022.

The NCI awarded ISB a 5-year, $13 million grant to lead a comprehensive cancer center and study sequential combinations of targeted inhibitors and immunotherapies. The program is designed to determine if the treatments yield greater patient benefit when administered in sequence rather than as monotherapies or as simultaneously administered combinations.