Adoptive immunotherapy can be used to treat intractable cancers but this involves taking T cells from a patient and growing them in a laboratory and, once outside the body, the T cells can fall into a state of exhaustion. This is a barrier that Professor Takeshi Yamada, Department of
Medical Technology, Immunology, Ehime Prefectural University of Health Sciences, Japan, is seeking to overcome. His work involves establishing a better understanding of the mechanisms of T cell exhaustion, which are currently not well known. Yamada and his team are focusing on intracellular
energy metabolism and epigenetic control in mouse models with a view to finding a way to inhibit T cell exhaustion. The researchers are developing protocols to improve T cell function for immunotherapy by controlling epigenetic changes involved in glutamine metabolism, which induces T cell
exhaustion. As previous research has focused on activating and proliferating tumour-specific T cells, Yamada's approach, with a focus on epigenetic control, is novel. The team is interested in T cell differentiation and its links to T cell exhaustion and so they are exploring the mechanism
of T cell differentiation via intracellular energy metabolism and epigenetic changes and how this can impact on exhaustion. The researchers previously clarified that the enhancement of glutamine metabolism that occurs during the activation of T cell cultures causes epigenetic changes that
induce T cell exhaustion and are expanding on this finding in order to develop a method to suppress T cell exhaustion via epigenetic control.