Publications by authors named "Jozafina Haj-Shomaly"

Article Synopsis
  • Current anti-cancer immunotherapies, while successful, only work for a small group of patients, highlighting the need for better biomarkers to predict treatment responses.
  • Researchers discovered that interferon-stimulated, Ly6E neutrophils can serve as a predictive biomarker for anti-PD1 therapy in mice, showing how they can enhance tumor response by activating T cells.
  • The study further confirmed that Ly6E neutrophils are an effective predictor of immunotherapy responses in humans with lung cancer and melanoma, achieving high accuracy in patient cohorts and public data analysis.
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Chemotherapy remains one of the main treatment modalities for cancer. While chemotherapy is mainly known for its ability to kill tumor cells directly, accumulating evidence indicates that it also acts indirectly by enhancing T cell-mediated anti-tumor immunity sometimes through immunogenic cell death. However, the role of immature immune cells in chemotherapy-induced immunomodulation has not been studied.

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Myeloid-derived suppressor cells (MDSCs) are known to promote tumor growth in part by their immunosuppressive activities and their angiogenesis support. It has been shown that Bv8 blockade inhibits the recruitment of MDSCs to tumors, thereby delaying tumor relapse associated with resistance to antiangiogenic therapy. However, the impact of Bv8 blockade on tumors resistant to the new immunotherapy drugs based on the blockade of immune checkpoints has not been investigated.

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Metastasis is the main cause of cancer-related mortality. Despite intense efforts to understand the mechanisms underlying the metastatic process, treatment of metastatic cancer is still challenging. Here we describe a chemotherapy-induced, host-mediated mechanism that promotes remodeling of the extracellular matrix (ECM), ultimately facilitating cancer cell seeding and metastasis.

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