Certain types of biochemical processes can impair the immune system’s ability to recognize and kill cancer cells. Purdue University’s W. Andy Tao and his associates have developed a new way to study these processes. They demonstrated the validity of their method in experiments involving leukemia and rare liver cancer cell lines.

Tao and 10 co-authors published the details of their new method Aug. 1 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Their work provides a system for tracking and identifying the various types of proteins and an unheralded but widely secreted class of bioparticles called extracellular vesicles (EVs) that can compromise immunotherapy.