Axial Discovery - Immunometabolism
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Immunometabolism
Metabolism creates a set of diverse tumor microenvironments (TME) across cancers and patients. Importantly, metabolism within each TME has a significant effect on immune cell function and the ability for immunotherapies and cell therapies to treat solid tumors. Particularly, immune and cancer cells actually converge on their metabolic pathways competing for the same resources to grow. This creates an environment to inhibit immune cells in the TME but also an opportunity to target metabolism to help immune cells kill cancer cells.
Companies like Agios (targeting IDH; although they recently sold off their immunometabolism portfolio to focus on PKA) have been built on the premise of targeting metabolism to treat cancer. However, the full potential of the field is still to be realized mainly due to the diversity of immune cells within the TME and the unique role of oxidative phosphorylation and glycolysis along with other pathways within immunometabolism.
Immunometabolism is such a complex field. Immunology is already hard enough. Adding metabolism on top of it only makes figuring out cause/effect relationships even more difficult. Opportunities in the field are:
Measuring the metabolism difference between a given tumor and immune cells in the TME
Assessing the metabolic requirements for each immune effector cell
Using this information to find weak spots in metabolism to pursue and develop new medicines. The hard part here is the differences might be so slight that therapeutic windows could be very narrow.
