Understanding LIGHT interactions offers promising new therapeutic strategies that target LIGHT-engaged pathways to fight against cancer and various infectious diseases.
By studying the effect of LIGHT in the transcriptional profile of a lymphoid malignancy, we found that HVEM, but not LT-betaR, stimulation induces a significant increase in the expression of chemokine genes such as IL-8, and an unexpected upregulation of apoptotic genes.
Flow cytometry analysis results demonstrate that LIGHT gene expression in cancer cells can greatly increase ICAM-1 expression level, IFNgamma alone can stimulate cancer cells to express ICAM-1, which can be highly augmented by LIGHT in a dose-dependent manner.
In aggregate, these data suggest that hf-HSV-LIGHT transduction may be useful for induction of immune responses to CLL and other B-cell lymphoid malignancies.