Experimental strategies to identify and develop novel anti-neoplastic therapies through in vitro or in vivo model systems that fail to account for host immunity may severely underestimate potentially powerful treatments. Clinically, many anti-cancer

therapies cause immunosuppression and lymphodepletion that may undermine their efficacy [61]. The careful choice of a combination of targeted and immune therapy may therefore be more efficacious in mediating sustained tumour regression [86]. The authors would like to acknowledge current members of the Felsher laboratory for critical discussion and previous members who have contributed to characterizing various models of oncogene addiction. Within the Felsher laboratory, studies of the tumour microenvironment have been funded by the Burroughs Welcome Fund Career Award, the Damon Runyon Foundation Lilly Clinical Investigator Award, NIH RO1 grant number Decitabine mouse Rapamycin cell line CA 089305, 105102, National Cancer

Institute’s In-vivo Cellular and Molecular Imaging Center grant number CA 114747, Integrative Cancer Biology Program grant number CA 112973, NIH/NCI PO1 grant number CA 034233, the Leukaemia and Lymphoma Society Translational Research grant number R6223-07 (D.W.F.), the Stanford Graduate Fellowship (K.R.), the Stanford Medical Scholars Research Fellowship (P.B.) and the Howard Hughes 3-mercaptopyruvate sulfurtransferase Medical Institute Research Training Fellowship (P.B.). The authors declare no competing financial interests. “
“We have established Leishmania tropica as the causative agent of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) in the region of India where the disease is endemic. The association between localized and circulating levels

of immune-determinants in CL patients was evaluated. Reverse transcription–polymerase chain reaction analysis revealed up-regulation of interferon-γ (IFN-γ), interleukin (IL)-1β, IL-8, tumour necrosis factor-α (TNF-α), IL-10 and IL-4 in dermal lesions at the pretreatment stage (n = 31) compared with healthy controls (P < 0·001) and a significant down-regulation after treatment (n = 14, P < 0·05). The results indicated that an unfavourable clinical outcome in CL was not related to an inadequate T helper 1 (Th1) cell response, but rather to impairment in multiple immune functions. Comparative assessment of treatment regimes with rifampicin (RFM) or sodium antimony gluconate (SAG) revealed tissue cytokine levels to be significantly reduced after treatment with RFM (P < 0·005), while no significant decrease was evident in the levels of IFN-γ, TNF-α and IL-10 (P > 0·05) as a result of treatment with SAG. Increased transcripts of monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) (P < 0·001) and inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) (P < 0·05) were evident before treatment in tissue lesions and remained high after treatment.