This year again, we were pleased to attend the Annual meeting of the AACR (American Association for Cancer Research), which took place in Washington DC, USA at the beginning of April.

Nadia Normand Ph.D. (Business Development Manager, tebu-bio), presented a poster with results from collaborative work between the Centre for Molecular Biophysics of the CNRS (Orléans, France), tebu-bio Laboratories (Le Perray en Yvelines, France), Anaxomics Biotech (Barcelona, Spain) and the Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy (Wroclaw, Poland).

This poster “miRNome analyses reveal that activity of CAF expressed podoplanin in the tumor microenvironment is modulated by exosome miRNAs involved in the PTEN-PI3K-AKT-mTOR signaling” is now available for downloading – get your copy here.

In a recent paper, Horita H. et al. identified a set of novel Post-Translational Modifications (PTMs) of the protein Programmed Cell Death Ligand (PD-L1).

Profile of PD-L1 post-translational modifications and their roles in regulating PD-L1 protein levels. Source: Horita H. et al. (2017) – http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neo.2017.02.006 (Cytoskleton Inc).

For this, a novel series of PTM enrichment assays  enabling the highly specific profiling of 4 key PTM profiles (Tyrosine phosphorylation (pY), Acetylation (Ac), Unbiquitination (Ub) and SUMOylation 2/3), have been used on EGF-stimulated A431 cell line. They revealed that EGF induced pY, Ac, mono- and poly-Ub Of PD-L1 in these EGF treated epidermoid carcinoma cells. The authors also suggested that the balance between mono- / poly-Ub of PD-L1 might regulate PD-L1 stability, as already described with LDB-1 protein.

These novel PD-L1 PTMs and their related regulatory actions might be valuable information in the future for the design of drug strategies targeting PD-L1/PD-1 immune checkpoint inhibition.