Turning a tumor’s ‘shield’ into a weapon against itself

A breast cancer tumor and its surrounding microenvironment. Credit: National Institutes of Health Tumor cells are “cunning,” according to Peter Yingxiao Wang. They have a nefarious way of evading the human immune responses that fight back against these cancerous invaders. Tumor cells express programmed death-ligand 1 (PD-L1) molecules, which work like a defensive shield that suppresses our immune cells, posing a hurdle for targeted cancer immunotherapies. Wang, the Chair of the Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Dwight C. and Hildagarde E. Baum Chair in Biomedical Engineering, Read More