TIGIT immunohistochemistry established a novel scoring system in classic Hodgkin lymphoma to potentially guide theraphy.

Nature, scientific reports, 2021

Immune checkpoint inhibition of the PD1/PD-L1 pathway has revolutionized cancer therapy. Recent experiments demonstrate that combination therapies that target new checkpoints like TIGIT are more effective than classical PD1/PD-L1 monotherapies. Over the last two years, TIGIT has attracted the attention from pharmaceutical companies worldwide: TIGIT turned out to be the most attractive target from a so called „second wave of checkpoint modulators“. Consequently, a future challenge is to determine which patients are most suitable to receive these combination immunotherapies. We believe that monoclonal antibodies like Dianova’s unique anti-TIGIT clones TG1 and TG2 for immunohistochemical analysis of patient tissue will provide valuable information to direct individual treatment options.

The actual scientific report from Annibali et al. published at nature.com demonstrates the use of anti-TIGIT antibody clone TG1 (DIA-TG1-M, Dianova, Germany, developed by ONCOdianova) to study TIGIT co-expression with PD1/PD-L1 in Hodgkin lymphoma.

Classic Hodgkin lymphoma (CHL) is a life threatening disease with an unusual tumoral morphology characterized by large atypical cells, namely Hodgkin Reed-Sternberg (HRS) cells. Lymphoma growth in a reactive immune cell microenvironment escapes host immune surveillance.

Researchers from the Unit of Haematology / Stem Cell Transplantation at the Medico University Hospital Rome have evaluated TIGIT, PD-1 and PD-L1 expression in 34 consecutive CHL patients. By applying a new scoring system for TIGIT immunoreactivity, researchers had been able to demonstrate that all TIGIT+ cases with higher score were PD-L1 , whereas TIGIT and PD-1 have been demonstrated to be co-expressed in peritumoral T-lymphocytes.

The new TIGIT scoring system allows to identify such modulation of immunocheckpoints PD1, PD-L1 and TIGIT in CHL. These data encourage further studies evaluating the role of TIGIT as a target for immunotherapies in CHL and moreover, to determine which patients are most suitable to receive these immunotherapies, and for whom combination therapy may be an appropriate treatment option.

DIA-TG1-M and  DIA-TG2-M (anti-TIGIT antibody clones TG1 andd TG2) for the identification of TIGIT-positive tumor infiltrating Tcells are available at both BIOZOL´s and DIANOVA´s webshop.