Publication highlights

Researchers from the Francis Crick Institute, UCL, Gustave Roussy and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), have discovered that expansion of mutant blood cells, a phenomenon linked to ageing, can be found in cancerous tumours, and this is associated with worse outcomes for patients. Clonal haematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP) is a condition where blood stem cells accumulate mutations over time. The researchers found that tumour-infiltrating clonal haematopoiesis, not CHIP alone, was associated with greater risk of relapse and cancer death. Patients with TI-CH had an expansion of myeloid cells which can support tumour progression and support. They also discovered that blood cells with TET2 mutations were more likely to be tumour-infiltrating, and that TET2 mutant myeloid cells remodelled the tumour microenvironment. Finally, they validated their findings in over 49,000 patients, finding that mutations were more common in harder-to-treat cancer types.

Radiotherapy is one of the most effective approaches to achieve tumour control in cancer patients, although healthy tissue injury due to off-target radiation exposure can occur. In this study, the Malanchi lab used a model of acute radiation injury to the lung, in the context of cancer metastasis, to understand the biological link between tissue damage and cancer progression. They found that locally activated neutrophils involved in the regeneration of tissue damaged by radiation could also aid the spread of cancer.

A study led by the Bonnet lab looks at how acute myeloid leukemia cells interact with and alter bone marrow. The team has produced an omics repository of potential biomarkers for different bone marrow cell populations.

In this study we found that via the release of leukotrienes, neutrophils selectively support the more metastatic subset of cancer cells infiltrating the distant tissue and that this activity can be blocked by an inhibitor of leukotriene production. This is one of the most important publications from my laboratory, as it has contributed to the understanding of the crucial responses of neutrophils during metastatic progression.