Augmenting Immunotherapy for Sarcomas

Background

Soft tissue sarcomas (STS), a rare collection of cancers originating from connective tissues, have proven difficult with immune-based therapies. Although anti PD1 antibodies, and other new immune therapies, have been successful in treating some cancers like lung cancer and melanoma, these drugs have yielded poor results for STS patients in clinical trials. The outcomes are likely due to the minimal immune activation at baseline against the tumors, and the sarcomas have fewer DNA mutations, therefore, they have fewer potential immune targets.

Project Goal

Kevin will be working to try to develop a strategy to address the lack of tumor antigens and immune activation in STS. They are attempting to develop a novel combination immunotherapy in a mouse preclinical model treating tumors with epigenetic modifiers. Those drugs can change gene expression in tumors and immune activators called STING agonist. Their overall goal is to use the epigenetic modifying drugs to generate new immune targets in the tumor and the STING agonist to cause immune activation against the tumor and new targets. They can then administer anti-PD1 antibodies to allow the immune system to eradicate these tumors.