A large number of patients with advanced lymphoma become refractory or relapse after initial treatment due to the persistence of minimal residual disease. Ideal immunotherapy strategy for eradicating the minimal residual disease of lymphoma and preventing the tendency to relapse need to be developed. Here, we use a mice model mimicked the disease entities of aggressive B-cell lymphoma dynamically to analyze the host anti-lymphoma immunity during the progression of lymphoma. We have shown that STAT3 activity was gradually enhanced in host immune effector cells with the progression of lymphoma. Inhibition of the STAT3 activity with a small molecule inhibitor was able to effectively enhance the function of both host innate and adaptive immunity, and thereby delayed the progression of lymphoma. Despite the therapeutic benefits were achieved by using of the STAT3 inhibitor, disrupting of STAT3 pathway did not prevent the eventual development of lymphoma due to the presence of point mutation of β2M, which controls immune recognition by T cells. Our findings highlight the complexity of the mechanism of immune evasion; therefore a detailed analysis of genes involved in the immune recognition process should be essential before an elegant immunotherapy strategy could be conducted.
Keywords: STAT3 inhibitor; immune evasion; immunotherapy; lymphoma; β2M gene.