New $1.4M grant supports innovative kidney cancer treatment strategy
Summary
Weill Cornell Medicine has received a $1.4 million, four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to investigate a new therapeutic approach for the most common form of kidney cancer.The grant is one of 10 Idea Awards the department funded this year to support innovative, high-risk, high-reward science that could lead to a paradigm shift in cancer care. The funding will enable principal investigators Dr. Lorraine Gudas and Dr. David Nanus to explore a cellular reprogramming strategy that may improve how patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma (ccRCC) respond to a form of immunotherapy, called checkpoint inhibitors. Today, while checkpoint inhibitors are showing significant treatment benefits for a wide variety of cancers including kidney cancer, most patients with clear cell renal cell carcinoma will become treatment resistant and ultimately die of their disease." Dr. David Nanus, the Mark W. Pasmantier Professor of Hematology and Oncology in Medicine and associate director of network integration at the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell MedicineOne current treatment approach for many cancer types is an immunotherapy called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell (CAR-T cell) therapy, which works by removing immune T cells from the body and genetically engineering them to recognize cancer cells based on the antigens they express. "Its years away from being in patients, but I think that the concept will be fairly easy to test pre-clinically," said Dr. Nanus, who is an oncologist and director of the NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center Healthcare Systems Cancer Program.