Today, the Swiss Cancer League awarded its most prestigious research prize to Dr. Mikael Pittet from the Center for System Biology at MGH, Boston. Dr. Pittet has done fundamental work in the field of immuno-therapies, in particular investigating the myeloid cells contribution. Immunotherapies - the treatments that support the body's immune system in the suppression of cancer cells - are a mainstream hope in the current fight against cancer.

This presentation of Mikael Pittet laboratory's latest work on cancer immunotherapy was given at the 2016 World Medical Innovation Forum.

Two CSB fellows - Kisoo Park, PhD and Christina Pfirschke, PhD - have been selected to receive a MGH ECOR Tosteson Postdoctoral Fellowship Award. The Tosteson Awards are given to the top-ranked applicants for the Fund for Medical Discovery Postdoctoral Awards. Congratulations, Kisoo and Christina!

CSB investigators - Mikael Pittet, PhD, Matthias Nahrendorf, MD, PhD, and John Chen, MD, PhD - have been named Distinguished Investigators of the Academy of Radiology Research. Congratulations!

An immune cell that protects against cancer. Macrophages are mostly viewed as tumor-promoting cells. They can infiltrate solid tumors in high numbers, and their presence at the tumor site is often associated with decreased patient survival. However, much less is known about macrophages located outside the tumor stroma. Mikael Pittet and colleagues now show that a population of lymph node macrophages, called subcapsular sinus (SCS) macrophages, unexpectedly protects against melanoma. The study was published in Science on March 17, 2016 and is available for download.

A recipe to improve cancer immunotherapy. Novel immune checkpoint blockade therapies can be extraordinarily effective but may benefit only the minority of patients whose tumors are pre-infiltrated by antitumor immune cells called CD8+ T cells. In a study published in Immunity, the Pittet lab at MGH Center for Systems Biology reports that rationally selected immunogenic chemotherapy can convert tumor microenvironments lacking T cells into ones displaying antitumor T cell immunity. This process makes unresponsive tumors sensitive to immune checkpoint blockade therapies and consequently raises hope to feasibly expand the proportion of human cancers responding to these therapies.