AACR Travel Grant

Allison Fitzgerald

Georgetown University, US

Immunotherapy has shown efficacy across a wide range of cancers, but it has been ineffective in pancreatic cancer thus far due to the thick stroma of stellate cells protecting the tumor. O’Connell and colleagues found a potential weakness in this wall. They discovered that inhibition of fibroblast activation protein in stellate cells reduces the stroma and allows natural killer cells to infiltrate and kill the tumor. Inhibiting this target in combination with anti-PD-1 treatment enhances efficacy in their model. Their work suggests a crack in the wall to make immunotherapy more effective for pancreatic cancer patients.

Guan-Yu Xiao

UT Southwestern Medical Center, US

Metastasis is the key event leading to mortality in cancer. A driver of this process in non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is upregulation of receptor tyrosine kinase (RTK) pathways. Guan-Yu Xiao and colleagues discovered that loss of endocytic machinery protein FCHSD2 alters trafficking of two RTKs - EGFR and MET - towards recycling and results in nuclear translocation of downstream effectors, resulting in significantly increased activity. Xiao’s work uncovers novel, surprising connections between trafficking and oncogenic signaling.

Renzo Perales

The University of Pennsylvania, US

Great work in vivo showing a potent in vivo anti-tumor  efficacy of TAMA (tumor associated mitochondria antigen)-based immunotherapy in combination with checkpoint inhibition in  murine kidney tumor models. It is a very innovative work showing that TAMA antigens are targetable and  can elicit a durable in vivo antitumor responses and therefore, they should be used in prophylactic or therapeutic IO approaches. It  is an advanced work, based on previous results of the same team on TAMA-vaccination, and is highly applicable as a proposed therapeutic approach,at least for renal cancers. More importantly, they provide mechanistic insights as to how checkpoint shapes the tumor microenvironment to enhance the efficacy of the TAMA-vaccine.

Uday Pratap

University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, US

Choosing the best therapeutic strategy to combat cancer is a key hurdle for physicians. In the case of glioblastoma, there is a great need to discover biomarkers to predict the response to harsh chemo- and radiation therapy. Pratap and colleagues found that estrogen receptor beta functions as a tumor suppressor and sensitizes tumors to these therapies through inhibiting DNA damage repair. Their results suggest that estrogen receptor beta may not only be a useful biomarker, but it may also be useful as a drug target to improve response to therapy. 

Ramya Ravindran

University of Michigan, US

Diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG) is a fatal pediatric brainstem tumor with 100% fatality. These tumors are often treated on the assumption that they are molecularly similar to adult high-grade gliomas; however, they are distinct. Ramya and her colleagues have generated a genetically engineered mouse model of DIPG which represents a novel platform to study the molecular pathways underlying disease pathogenesis. An understanding of the functions of mutations that lead up to the disease can help to develop novel therapies for DIPG

"I'm excited to be presenting at the AACR 2018 Conference and I'm thankful to Proteintech for their support in making this possible.”

Samaresh Sau

Wayne State University, US

Programmed death ligand -1 (PD-L1) checkpoint inhibitors such as atezolizumab have been revolutionizing cancer treatment. However, the potential of these drugs has not been fully realized. To improve the stromal penetration of checkpoint inhibitors to tumors, Sau and colleagues have chemically linked a chemotherapeutic agent to atezolizumab for immune-chemo combination therapy. Their current data suggest that this approach may significantly improve the potency of checkpoint inhibitors for multiple cancer types.

“I am delighted to network and develop cancer-killing smart drugs.”