Funded Research Projects
Year Awarded: 2022
Amount Awarded: $60,000
Institution: UCSF, Benjamin Huang, MD
Focus Area: Acute Myeloid Leukemia
Summary of Project: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) remains a therapeutic challenge with high mortality rates despite intensive therapies. Furthermore, cure rates for pediatric AML have not significantly improved for nearly 30 years due a lack of effective biology-based therapies. While immunotherapies have yielded remarkable outcomes in B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (B-ALL), identifying similar immunotherapy targets in AML remains a challenge due to similarities between AML and normal blood cells and early AML immunotherapy-based clinical trials have been disappointing to-date. To address the issue above, Dr. Huang’s team integrated large, advanced sequencing and protein datasets to identify potential targets expressed in pediatric AML, but not in normal bone marrow or other normal tissue types. Using this integrated approach, they identified a collection of new promising immunotherapy targets. Based on their promising preliminary data, they propose to validate the expression of these targets using cell surface proteomics, a powerful technology that identifies hundreds to thousands of cell surface targets simultaneously within a given leukemia cell population. Dr. Huang’s team will then use accurate models of AML to test whether using drugs that recognize these targets specifically will potently kill AML cells.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Year Awarded: 2023
Amount Awarded: $66,000
Institution: Mayo Clinic of Jacksonville, Dr. Hong Qin, MD,PhD and Dr. Rocio K. Rivera-Valentin, MD, PhD.
Focus Area: Pediatric Brain Tumors
Summary of Project: Our project aims at using Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cells specifically designed to recognize PDL1 and using this interaction to generate activated T cells that can recognize and kill cells that express this ligand. We have observed that DIPG and other high-grade glioma patient derived cell lines express high levels of PDL1 and co-culture with PDL1 targeted CAR-T can lead to T-Cell activation. We plan to further evaluate this CAR-T construct using in-vivo models with intracranial delivery of CAR-T cells and complete pre-clinical data to develop a Phase 1 clinical trial.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
Year Awarded: 2023
Amount Awarded: $100,000
Institution: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Dr. Bagatell, Head of Neuroblastoma Research.
Focus Area: Neuroblastoma
Summary of Project: The COG Neuroblastoma Committee and the COG Foundation are currently developing a plan in conjunction with
Nationwide Children’s Hospital for a large-scale project that would include whole exome sequencing, RNA
sequencing, and methylation profiling on tumors from patients with more favorable neuroblastoma diagnoses who
nonetheless went on to progress with poor outcomes.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
