Researchers find immune cells that guard frequent site of cancer spread

To address the need to understand why, researchers in the laboratory of Mary Jo Turk, Ph.D., Co-Director of the Immunology and Cancer Immunotherapy Research Program at Dartmouth's and Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center (NCCC) have spent the past year studying immunity to metastatic cancer within lymph nodes.

While T cells can freely travel from lymph nodes into the bloodstream and back to the lymph nodes, researchers in Turk's lab have discovered a novel population of tumor-fighting T cells that do not circulate, but rather stay in lymph nodes where they provide protection against melanoma. "These T cells, for whatever reason, have changed their program and stay in the lymph nodes where they persist and kill tumor cells for many months while never entering circulation," says Turk.

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