Understanding how the immune system operates effectively—and what goes wrong when it doesn’t—is key to improving cancer treatment and prevention. In healthy bodies, the immune system detects and eliminates pre-cancerous cells, but cancer can evade these defenses, bypassing the immune system’s intricate layers of protection. Researchers at the Allen Institute for Immunology's Oncology team are focused on unraveling the immune malfunctions that contribute to cancers like multiple myeloma, aiming to identify new ways to restore immune function and improve patient outcomes.

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multiple myeloma: investigating a blood cancer’s immune evasion

Multiple myeloma is a type of blood cancer affecting plasma cells in the bone marrow, which are critical for producing immune cells. This blood cancer affects around 35,000 people in the U.S. each year and kills nearly 13,000. Current treatments for multiple myeloma have improved survival but the relapse (or recurrence) rate for the tumor is high, and 5-year survival is still only around 50%. Researchers are studying how this cancer evades the immune system and how it can persist at low levels for years before becoming more aggressive.

In collaboration with Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the Allen Institute team is analyzing how the immune system responds to treatments like autologous stem cell transplants, where a patient’s healthy cells are used to replace the cancerous ones. They aim to determine whether this approach “resets” the immune system and how the cancer manipulates immune defenses. These insights could pave the way for new therapies targeting this disease’s immune evasion tactics.

A focus on advancing treatment for Multiple Myeloma

As a hematologic malignancy, in which the tumor is an immune cell, growing in the presence of an otherwise intact immune system, multiple myeloma offers unique opportunities to uncover basic immunologic principles. The Oncology Program is focused on understanding the heterogeneity of malignant plasma cells between patients and on defining how these differ biologically from long-lived bone marrow plasma cells in healthy individuals. Some of these tumor cells exhibit the ability to establish and maintain themselves outside the bone marrow niche as plasmacytomas, providing an opportunity to discover key molecular features of the microenvironment that can support plasma cell growth and survival. The researchers are also working to understand the impact of the tumor and treatments on the overall immune state of patients before and after initiation of therapy.