Funded by the Dick Vitale Pediatric Cancer Research Fund with support from the Rudd Foundation in memory of Leslie Rudd
Immunotherapy is a type of cancer treatment that boosts the body’s immune system so that it can fight the cancer. Whilst this type of treatment has proven very successful for certain cancers in adult patients, this approach has been much less effective for the treatment of cancer in children. One reason for this is that the immune system of children is very different from adults and may not respond to treatments designed to target adult immune cells. Remarkably little is known about the cell types in children that suppress anti-cancer immune responses. The Brown Lab recently discovered a new type of immune cell —Thetis cells — that may be pivotal in reducing the efficacy of immunotherapy in the very young. We hypothesize that Thetis cells help to “train” T cells not to attack the body’s own normal cells, and in so doing creates an immune environment that also tolerates malignant tumors. In this project, the Brown Lab seeks to reveal, on the molecular level, how Thetis cells work and thus how to create immune therapies for children while not provoking auto-immune diseases that overactive T cells sometimes cause.
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