Disabling critical ‘node’ revs up attack when cancer immunotherapies fall short

An existing drug known as a JAK inhibitor may help patients who don’t respond to the so-called checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy drugs overcome that resistance, suggests a new preclinical study. Importantly, the results demonstrate that shutting down the interferon pathway, shown here to be critical to a tumor’s resistance to immunotherapy, with a JAK inhibitor may improve checkpoint inhibitor drugs and even bypass the need for combinations of these drugs, which often come with serious side effects.