Venous thrombosis is an underappreciated adverse event associated with cancer immunotherapy. Roopkumar et al. describe the incidence of venous thrombosis in individuals with cancer receiving immunotherapy and suggest that elevated levels of myeloid-derived suppressor cells, interleukin-8, and soluble vascular cell adhesion molecule 1 before immunotherapy correlate with development of venous thrombosis.

The most deadly complication of Plasmodium falciparum infection is cerebral malaria (CM) with a case fatality rate of 15-25% in African children despite effective antimalarial chemotherapy. There are no adjunctive treatments for CM, so there is an urgent need to identify new targets for therapy. Here we show that the glutamine analog 6-diazo-5-oxo-L-norleucine (DON) rescues mice from CM when administered late in the infection a time at which mice already are suffering blood-brain barrier dysfunction, brain swelling, and hemorrhaging accompanied by accumulation of parasite-specific CD8 + effector T cells and infected red blood cells in the brain. Remarkably, within hours of DON treatment mice showed blood-brain barrier integrity, reduced brain swelling, decreased function of activated effector CD8 + T cells in the brain, and levels of brain metabolites that resembled those in uninfected mice. These results suggest DON as a strong candidate for an effective adjunctive therapy for CM in African children.cerebral malaria | adjunctive therapy | CD8 + T cells | glutamine metabolism | DON

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Key events in T cell-dependent antibody responses, including affinity maturation, are dependent on the B cell’s presentation of antigen to helper T cells at critical check points in germinal center formation in secondary lymphoid organs. Here we show that Toll-like receptor 9 (TLR9) signaling blocked the ability of antigen-specific B cells to capture, process and present antigen and to activate antigen-specific helper T cells in vitro. In a mouse model in vivo and in a human clinical trial the TLR9 agonist, CpG, enhanced the magnitude of the antibody response to a protein vaccine but failed to promote affinity maturation. Thus, TLR9 signaling may enhance antibody titers at the expense of the ability of B cells to engage in germinal center events that are highly dependent on B cells’ antigen capture and presentation.