The interactions within the tumour microenvironment can impact the effectiveness of cancer treatment, which is why Dr. Katey Enfield has centred her new BC Cancer lab on studying the spatial interactions between cancer cells, tissues and structures within the lung and applying new technologies that maintain spatial organization.
“Immunotherapy drugs can reactivate the immune response against lung tumours,” notes the BC Cancer scientist. “Unfortunately, these drugs only work in a subset of patients so the work I will do will help us start to understand why they work in some patients and don’t work in others.”
As a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Enfield studied the impact of immunotherapies on B cells, a type of immune cell that creates antibodies to fight infections and is also part of the immune response against tumours. High levels of B cells in lung tumours have been associated with improved responses to immunotherapies. Dr. Enfield’s work found that this is in part due to the generation of antibodies that target aberrantly expressed proteins in cancer cells, which are either overproduced or functionally different than they should be.
In the Enfield Lab, she will continue this work to understand what spatial multicellular relationships support a good B cell response in some patients but not in others. Profiling patient samples using spatial technologies will be a crucial part of this work as it will provide real-life examples of how these cells are organized in the lung tumour microenvironment.
