Vassilis Gorgoulis and colleagues recently published a study in Molecular Cancer

Professor Gorgoulis and collaborators uncover for the first time, in the latest issue of Molecular Cancer, the role of immune cell senescence within the tumor micro-environment and its impact on the response to immunotherapy in melanoma patients. Immunotherapy has significantly improved cancer treatment. However, it is not effective in all cancer patients, rendering the need to further define the differences among responders and non-responders at the molecular and cellular level. Applying a validated senescence molecular signature termed “SeneVick” in combination with an innovative and highly specific senescence-detecting biomarker (GLF16), the authors robustly demonstrate that melanoma patients who did not respond to immunotherapy exhibited increased cellular senescence in immune cell populations compared to responders. Moreover, they show that senescent immune cells display immunosuppressive properties driving defective immune responses and treatment failure. These findings delineate the need for estimating cell senescence in the design of efficient immunotherapy strategies (patient stratification).

pubmed

Immune cell senescence drives responsiveness to immunotherapy in melanoma
Pantelis P, Tremoulis DC, Evangelou K, Bakouros P, Magkouta S, Ntintas OA, Veroutis D, Theocharous G, Kostopoulos IV, Thanos DF, Chatziioannou E, Anastasiou IA, Lagopati N, Valakos D, Skaltsas D, Pop OT, Abdou MT, Gagos S, Kletsas D, Thanos D, Stratigos AJ, Röcken M, Flatz L, Chrousos GP, Vlachakis D, Tsitsilonis OE, Petty R, Karamitros T, Gorgoulis VG.
Mol Cancer 2025 Dec 10;24(1):308. doi: 10.1186/s12943-025-02517-1.