In summary, we found a cool new mechanism with exciting clinical implications. This study was led by the brilliant
@AviadBenShmuel @YaelGruper @CoralHalperin!
Huge thanks to our collaborators, the reviewers who truly made this story much better, and @CD_AACR for this journey!

Is this relevant to human cancer? Yes! Using our findings from mice to define molecular markers, we stained patient samples and found that high expression of the NK ligand in stromal cells correlated with poor disease outcome in breast cancer patients

What happens in actual tumors? When we deplete NK cells, fibroblasts thrive and tumors that usually dont have many fibroblasts become much more desmoplastic

How do we know it is more efficient? We filmed them! Using live imaging, we measured the kinetics of NK cell killing of cancer cells vs. CAFs, and saw that CAFs were much more sensitive to NK cytotoxicity than cancer cells

Using 3 different breast cancer models and tri-cultures of CAFs, NK and cancer cells, we found that CAFs act as decoys for NK cells. How?
They express ligands for NK receptors, NK cells are attracted to them, and then they kill them way more efficiently than they kill cancer!

NK cells are ideal candidates for cancer killing since they don't need antigen specificity. But they are usually not active in tumors. We wondered whether this could be due to inhibition by CAFs 🧵👇