Investigating the effect of immune therapy on certain immune cells

Dr Meredith O’Keeffe and her team aim to better understand how certain immune therapies affect sentinel cells in the immune system. Understanding how these guard cells might help to kill tumour cells could help to improve current immunotherapies.

Hope for the future

Immunotherapies work by helping our immune system to attack cancer cells. Although it is proving to be a game-changing treatment for some patients, immunotherapy does not work for all cancer types of for all patients. This project hopes to find ways to help immunotherapy treat melanoma better so more people can have successful treatment.

Meet the scientist

Dr Meredith O’Keeffe loves to walk and hike with her family and their “crazy” Airedale terrier, boogie boarding down the coast with her son and enjoys regular Pilates sessions.

The science

Checkpoint inhibitors are a new type of immunotherapy that is a major focus against many cancers - including skin cancer. These therapies include the targeting of molecular brakes – called program cell death, or PD1 – on immune cells. Checkpoint inhibitors turn off the brakes on cells of the immune system, enabling them to better kill tumour cells. PD-1 – an immune cell brake – also exists on specialized sentinel cells of the immune system called dendritic cells. It is currently unknown what role dendritic cells play and how immunotherapies influence them.

Dr Meredith O’Keeffe and her team are now trying to find out how PD-1 immunotherapy affects dendritic cells. Understanding how dendritic cells help to kill cancer cells may help to improve current immunotherapies.