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Researchers demonstrate that IL-2 is also a growth factor for B cells.
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The gene for the human cytotoxic T lymphocyte-associated antigen (CTLA-4) is cloned.
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Charles A. Janeway and Ruslan Medzhitov demonstrate that human TLR4 can mediate the immune response.
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Hsiou-Chi Liou and colleagues find that c-Rel, a lymphoid-specific member of the NF-kappaB/Rel family of transcriptional factors, is essential for B lymphocyte survival and cell cycle progression,[i] and that it is important for inducible cytokine and cytokine receptor expression and a key regulator of early activation and proliferation in T cells.[ii]
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Ellis L. Reinherz and colleagues determine the crystal structure of a T cell receptor in complex with peptide and MHC class II.
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Dietmar J. Kappes discovers a mouse with a mutation in a master regulator gene controlling T cell fate. Six years later, he identifies the gene as Th-POK, and later shows that its disregulation causes lymphoid transformation. This finding is significant in linking how cells develop with how cancers develop.
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A therapeutic vaccine, developed by Cornelis (Kees) Melief and Sjoerd Van Der Burg at Leiden University Medical Center, demonstrates durable complete responses in some women with HPV-16+ vulvar intraepithelial neoplasias (VINs), a disease that normally has a spontaneous regression rate of less than 2 percent.
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Anjana Rao and colleagues Mamta Tahiliani and L. Aravind discover the enzymatic activity of TET proteins as iron and 2-oxoglutarate-dependent dioxygenases that oxidise 5-methylcytosine in DNA, thus altering gene expression in stem cells, cancers, and the brain among others. Loss-of-function mutations in TET2 are shown to be frequent in myelodysplastic syndromes and myeloproliferative neoplasms including chronic myelomonocytic and acute myeloid lymphomas.
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The FDA granted accelerated approval to pembrolizumab (Keytruda), an anti-PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor, for patients with recurrent or metastatc head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).
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The FDA granted accelerated approval to pembrolizumb (Keytruda), an anti-PD-1 checkpoint inhibitor, for both adult and pediatric patients with refractory or relapsed classical Hodgkin lymphoma (cHL).
