The Dendritic Cell Strikes Back

The field of cancer immunotherapy and checkpoint blockade has focused largely on direct effects on T cells. In this issue of Immunity , Garris et al. (2018) show that the efficacy of anti-PD-1 therapy depends on a T-cell-dendritic-cell (DC) licensing loop fueled by IFN-γ and IL-12, thereby establishing a central role for DCs in promoting anti-cancer T cell immunity during checkpoint blockade.