2017 Collaborative Research Development Grant Recipient — Tyler Curiel, MD
Project Summary
Ovarian cancer elicits strong anti-cancer immunity, but the cancer is not eliminated. Our group has pioneered studies to understand why ovarian cancer is not immunologically eliminated, and has clinically tested promising approaches that could be significantly effective. Standard ovarian cancer treatment combines diverse approaches. Nonetheless, most immune therapy trials (including our early work) only test one immune treatment at a time. As we understand better the immune impediments in ovarian cancer, we can develop a program to combine our most successful approaches that we expect to synergize based on our understanding of their mechanisms.
We will develop rationally designed, effective multi-modal immune therapy for ovarian cancer using approaches in three key areas: i) reducing immune impediments to effective ovarian cancer immunotherapy, ii) blocking molecular mechanisms that drive tumor growth and inhibit anti-tumor immunity and iii) using new generation adoptive T cell transfers.
This program has three highly integrated and interactive projects led by four ovarian cancer thought leaders, to identify optimal approaches in these three key areas and means to combine them for maximal clinical effects. This rationally-designed immunotherapy can be safe, tolerable, effective, quickly translated, affordable and logistically amenable to appropriate scale out for wide application.
Our program will allow development of a major grant to test approaches clinically, first in resistant cancers, and later in relapse prevention and as treatment after failure of front-line therapy.
Co-Investigators
- Jose Conejo-Garcia, MD, PhD, Wistar Institute
- Carl June, MD, University of Pennsylvania
- Daniel Powell, Jr., PhD, University of Pennsylvania