The Role of Immune and Other Cells in the Tumor Microenvironment in Cancer

We are studying the immune environment associated with response to CAR-T Cell Therapy in Kidney Cancer with the Marasco lab in Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

CAR-T Cell Therapy in Kidney Cancer

Metastatic clear cell renal cell carcinoma (mccRCC) patients have a poor 5-year overall survival rate, and there is an urgent need to develop therapeutics for these patients. Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, which reprograms a patient’s immune system to recognize and attack cancer cells, has shown success in blood cancers but has not yet been translated to solid tumors. The goal of this project is to develop CAR-T cell therapy for kidney cancer by fine-tuning immune CAR-T cells to recognize and eliminate only cancer cells while sparing normal cells.

We are analyzing scRNAseq and multi-omics single-cell data generated as part of this project by Dr. Yufei Wang and Prof. Wayne Marasco in The Marasco Laboratory in the Department of Cancer Immunology and Virology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Learn more with this video.

Publications

Funding Sources

This project is funded by the DoD CDMRP, and methods were developed using CZI Science Seed Network funds.

DoD CZI Science

References

Wang, Yufei, Alicia Buck, Marion Grimaud, Aedin C. Culhane, Sreekumar Kodangattil, Cecile Razimbaud, Dennis M. Bonal, et al. 2022. “Anti-CAIX BBζ CAR4/8 T Cells Exhibit Superior Efficacy in a ccRCC Mouse Model.” Molecular Therapy - Oncolytics 24 (March): 385–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.omto.2021.12.019.