Cancers like melanoma are hard to treat, not least because they have a varied bag of tricks for defeating or evading treatments. A combined research effort by scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and researchers in the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam and the University of Oslo, Norway, shows exactly how tumors, in their battles to survive, will go so far as to starve themselves in order to keep the immune cells that would eradicate them from functioning.
The immunotherapies currently administered for melanomas work by removing obstacles that keep immune cells called T cells from identifying and killing tumor cells. Recent research suggested that in melanoma, another blocker could assist the T cells — this one to stop an enzyme called IDO1 that is overproduced by the cancer cells. IDO1 breaks down an essential amino acid, tryptophan, which is needed to make…
