Fueling T-cell Antitumor Immunity: Amino Acid Metabolism Revisited

2021-12-12 T cells are the key players in eliminating malignant tumors. Adoptive transfer of tumor antigen-specific T cells and immune checkpoint blockade has yielded durable antitumor responses in the clinic, but not all patients respond initially and some that do respond eventually have tumor progression. Thus, new approaches to enhance the utility of immunotherapy are needed. T-cell activation and differentiation status are tightly controlled at the transcriptional, epigenetic, and metabolic levels. Amino acids are involved in multiple steps of T-cell antitumor immunity, including T-cell activation, proliferation, effector function, memory formation as well as functional exhaustion. In this review, we briefly discuss how amino acid metabolism is linked to T-cell fate decisions and summarize how amino acid de…