These mutations occur in more than 90% of pancreatic cancer cases and drastically reduce response to immunotherapy.
A new study in
Nature Communications takes an initial step toward better understanding how KRAS drives immune evasion and demonstrates a lowering of the KRAS activity resulting in a more favorable immune environment to fight cancer.
Previous strategies to block the KRAS oncogene therapeutically have focused on counteracting its growth-promoting role in cancer.
“Instead, our study shows that oncogenic KRAS plays a profound immunosuppressive role in cancer maintenance, and that treatment of cancer will be improved by simultaneously inhibiting KRAS and activating immune pathways suppressed by the cancer,” says Oleksi Petrenko, research assistant professor in the department of microbiology and immunology in the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University.