Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation
Cancer immunotherapy has been one of the great advances in the treatment of cancer in the past decade. In B-cell cancers, hijacking T-cells by insbertion of a synthetic receptor (CAR-T cells) enables these cells to recognize and kill lymphoma through a specific marker (CD19). However, despite CAR-T leading to high rates of remission, only about 40% of patients are cured. Some major causes for why CAR-T does not work in patients is too great a burden of tumor cells and the cancer learning to hide the target the CAR-T needs to be effective. Therefore, there is great interest in combining CAR-T with other cancer therapies to improve efficacy. We have a clinical trial combining 2 drugs, mosunetuzumab and polatuzumab, targeting other lymphoma markers (CD20 and CD79b), together with CAR-T in patients with aggressive B-cell lymphomas. Using this approach, we hope to improve outcomes by addressing the main reasons for CAR-T failure. In this grant, we will track a patient’s response to treatment by monitoring a patient’s blood for small tumor fragments, to allow us to determine when extra therapy is needed in addition to CAR-T. We will precisely measure the amount of target markers on lymphoma cells to assess its importance for success of this therapy. Lastly, as CAR-T therapy has a high risk of infection, we will monitor recovery of the immune system to learn how adding extra therapies may affect a patient’s risk.
Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation
Pancreatic cancer is a really bad disease that’s hard to treat. Even though treatments like immunotherapy have helped with other cancers, they haven’t worked well for pancreatic cancer. Some people get pancreatic cancer because of a problem gene passed down in their family, like BRCA. We tried treating these people with a mix of immunotherapy drugs, and it worked amazingly well for a few. Their cancer completely went away, and they stayed cancer-free for over 5 years. Now, we’re trying to figure out why it worked for some and not others. We are doing some lab experiments in mice with pancreatic cancer and it seems like something in the cancer cells called STING might be the main reason why this treatment is working. We want to study more tumors from people with pancreatic cancer and the BRCA gene problem to confirm this. Also, we plan to do more tests on mice to see if we can make STING work better in those that don’t respond to treatment at first. If these tests work, it could help create a new treatment for pancreatic cancer in the future.
Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation
Blood cell cancers often bear mutations in STAT3. This protein is normally beneficial but, when overactive, becomes a cancer ‘driver’. More than 150 relevant mutations have been identified but only 7 have been studied in any detail. Thus, it remains unknown how mutations alter STAT3 activity to drive blood cancers. In fact, the same can be said of most oncogenes. The capacity to identify mutations far exceeds the capacity to appraise them. Our research will directly address this problem. To that end, we have devised an experimental platform that enables us to study all known STAT3 mutations at once. This platform is scalable, new mutations can be easily added, and readily adaptable to other cancer drivers. It is also designed to be implement in mice, allowing us test drugs in vivo, across all mutants at once. Using this platform, we will advance basic understanding of STAT3 and inform treatment options for associated blood cancers.
In recent years, colorectal cancer (CRC) has become the third most common and second most deadly cancer in the US. CRC is the leading cause of cancer death among Americans under 50 years old, but experts do not know why rates are increasing among young people. Moreover, we do not have a good way of detecting people who are at higher risk of CRC. These people should receive early monitoring and undergo extra measures to prevent CRC. How can we identify these at-risk individuals? We propose that certain bacteria cause the production of an enzyme (DUOX2) in the gut. High levels of this enzyme are found in people with gut inflammation and people with CRC. In the proposed research, we plan to test whether patients with different types of CRC have different levels of DUOX2. We expect that some CRC types will have higher levels than others. Next, we will try to identify the bacteria that lead to high DOUX2 levels. Discovering these bacteria may help to identify people at higher risk of CRC (people with higher amounts of these bacteria) and suggest new cancer treatments (ones targeting these bacteria). Finally, we will test whether drugs that are already approved for use in humans, along with other products of bacteria, can reduce levels of DUOX2 in the gut. Identifying these drugs may improve prevention and treatment for CRC.
Our research project focuses on improving the lives of women battling breast cancer by increasing their participation in clinical trials. Clinical trials are studies that help us find better ways to treat cancer. Right now, breast cancer is a big concern, especially for Black and Hispanic women. We want to change that.
We plan to host special events in South Florida where women can learn about clinical trials in a simple way. We will have experts talking about what clinical trials are, who can join, and what the benefits and drawbacks might be. These events will be in different counties like Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach. We know each place has its own challenges and needs, so we’re adapting our approach to help as many women as possible.
Not many women join clinical trials, which means we don’t learn enough about new treatments. Our project aims to change this by reaching out to communities and making sure everyone has the right information. We especially want to help women from backgrounds that haven’t had many chances to be part of research.
Our goal is to make these events easy to understand and welcoming. We’ll even provide information in Spanish for our Hispanic community. By doing this, we hope to inspire more women to join clinical trials. The research we do together could lead to better treatments and better chances of beating breast cancer. We’re excited about the possibility of helping more women survive and feel better during their fight against cancer.
In patients with hormone positive breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body eventually the cancer can stop responding to hormone blocking pills and their cancer starts to grow again. In this project we will develop vaccines that eliminate breast cancer cells that no longer respond to hormone blocking pills. This will cause the remaining breast cancer cells start responding again to hormone blockers. The result of these vaccines would be that those patients with hormone positive breast cancer will have a much longer time where that the hormone blocking medication would work. The immune response would also help to kill more of the breast cancer cells. This should mean that patients will live much longer with hormone positive breast cancer that has spread. This research will be tested first in mice and then in patients with hormone positive breast cancer that has spread to other parts of the body.
We are testing a drug, tucatinib with a form of focused radiation called stereotactic radiosurgery for a type of breast cancer (HER2-positive) that affects 20-25% of breast cancer cases when it spreads to the brain.
This study will help find out if the combination of tucatinib and radiation is safe and if patients can tolerate it well without too many side effects.
About 40 patients with this type of breast cancer that has spread to the brain will be part of the study. First, they will receive the drug tucatinib along with the focused radiation treatment. After that, they will continue taking tucatinib along with two other medicines called capecitabine and trastuzumab. These three medicines are already used as the standard treatment and have been effective for patients like these. Patients will receive this combination until their tumor grows back or if there are serious side effects.
This study will also help find out the correct dose of tucatinib to use. Additionally, the study will answer how well the treatment works and how it affects brain function.
Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation
Lymphoma is one of the most common cancers in the United States. People who are diagnosed with lymphoma often receive chemotherapy treatment, which can cause a lot of physical and emotional side effects. Although lymphoma is common, not that much is known about how nutrition or physical activity could help lymphoma patients.
Because so little is known, this research study plans to first explore if nutrition and exercise is something that lymphoma patients are interested in and able to do during chemotherapy. Secondly, this research study will look into whether the nutrition and exercise plan helped patients with the side effects of chemotherapy on their body, mind, and quality of life.
Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation
Our goal is to make sure all women with cancer get medical care that is consistent with what is important to them, no matter their race and ethnicity. To do this, we will work together with community health workers, who are trusted professionals that help connect people from their communities to medical care through education, support, and advocacy. Our past research shows that community health workers want to help cancer patients get the right care. They can do this by having conversations about advance care planning, which is a way for patients to think about the kind of medical care they would want if they became too sick to speak for themselves. However, community health workers need more training to have these conversations with patients. We will create a program to teach community health workers how to help patients with advance care planning. Next, we will improve the program by getting feedback from community health workers and making changes based on their suggestions. Finally, we will test this program by having community health workers have advance care planning conversations with cancer patients based on what they learned. We will then get feedback from both the patients they talk to and the community health workers to find out whether these conversations were useful. In the future, community health workers could work together with doctors to make sure that cancer patients get the right medical care so that they live as well as possible during their cancer journey.
Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation
Sarcomas are cancers of the bone and muscles, often seen in children and young adults, which are very hard to treat with very few patients surviving. Our aim is to improve treatment options for these patients. A vaccine trial using patient’s dendritic cells which are a type of immune cells, modified to identify and attack the individualized cancer was conducted at Sylvester comprehensive cancer center in 2019. Surprisingly, we noted good response in a few patients, who remain cancer free over 2 years from receiving the vaccine treatment. Therefore, the aim of this research proposal is to study the immune/non-immune cells of the surgically removed tumors and blood of patients treated on this trial. Using special high-resolution imaging methods in which key immune markers are tagged in the tissue, we will describe the immune cells in each patient’s cancer environment and correlate these to whether the patient did or did not respond to the cancer vaccine. We will also measure key immune cells in the blood of these patients collected after vaccine treatment and compare this with response to the vaccine. These detailed immune studies on patient tissue and blood samples will then guide future anti-sarcoma cancer vaccines and potential immune cell therapy to cure these aggressive cancers.
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