Project description:
Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer that affects children and young adults more often than any other group. While current treatments like intensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy can be highly effective, they often come with long-term side effects. Our team has now developed new immunotherapies using single-cell analysis that target the disease from multiple angles, with the potential to treat Hodgkin lymphoma patients with novel, targeted immunotherapies. Using high-resolution single-cell analysis, we were able to demonstrate the key role of the molecule CD86 in patients with Hodgkin lymphoma and show that CD86 helps the tumor evade the immune system. By blocking CD86, immune cells could be reactivated, and specialized CAR-T cells were developed to directly target CD86 — with great success in the laboratory. Our next step is to translate these promising findings into a clinical trial.
Publication:
Gottschlich A*, Grünmeier R*, Hoffmann GV*, Nandi S*, Kavaka V, Müller PJ, Jobst J, Öner A , Kaiser R, Gärtig J, Piseddu I, Frenz-Wiessner S, Fairley SD, Schulz H, Igl V, Janert TA, di Fina L, Mulkers M, Thomas, M, Briukhovetska D, Simnica D, Carlini E, Tsiverioti CA, Trefny MP, Lorenzini T, Märkl F, Mesquita P , Brabenec, R, Strzalkowski T, Stock S, Michaelides S, Hellmuth J, Thelen M, Reinke S, Klapper W, Gelebart PF, Nicolai L, Marr C, Beltrán E , Megens RTA, Klein C, Baran-Marszak F, Rosenwald A, von Bergwelt-Baildon M, Bröckelmann PJ, Endres S and Kobold S; Dissection of single-cell landscapes for the development of chimeric antigen receptor T cells in Hodgkin lymphoma. Blood, 2025. * These authors contributed equally
Submitting the Paper of the Month:
Else Kröner-Fresenius-Stiftung is using the series “Paper of the Month” to report in an exemplary and hot-off-the-press style on the outstanding work being done by the scientists it supports. We regularly present publications which have recently appeared in especially renowned journals, have emerged from foundation funding and been given appropriate acknowledgment. This is done in the respective categories “Original Paper” and “Review”. In the case of each of these publications, the first author and/or senior author are being funded by the foundation.
We invite all project managers, fellowship recipients and members of graduate study programs to send their work in accordance with the stated criteria as proposal for Paper of the Month to Ms. Anne Asschenfeldt (a.asschenfeldt@ekfs.de).
More Paper of the Month can be found here.
