John Ligon, MD

Funded by the Dick Vitale Pediatric Cancer Research Fund

Recent advances have shown that it is possible to use a patient’s own immune system to fight cancer. Osteosarcoma, the most common bone cancer in children and young adults, is one cancer type that has not responded to immune-based treatments. Most patients who relapse die when the osteosarcoma spreads to the lung, and it is critically important to design new treatments to prevent these young lives from being lost.

Dr. Ligon’s team analyzed osteosarcoma samples from human patients and found that while immune cells are present in osteosarcoma lung tumors, they are kept at the outside of the tumor because the tumor has several ways to “exclude” these immune cells. In collaboration with Dr. Sayour, Dr. Ligon’s team proposes to use a new immune-based therapy called an RNA nanoparticle vaccine, which may be able to reprogram the tumor and allow immune cells to kill the cancer.

Based on promising data from the lab and from treating small animals such as dogs with osteosarcoma, Dr. Ligon proposes a clinical trial of this treatment in human patients with osteosarcoma which has spread to the lungs. He proposes to establish that this treatment is safe and find the right dose for future clinical trials. He will also perform studies on blood and tumor samples to understand how the vaccine works against osteosarcoma. This clinical trial will study a new treatment for a cancer that currently is incurable and help us understand how this new treatment works to help design future studies.

Hatem Soliman, MD

Funded by Hooters of America, LLC

The goal of this project is to understand experiences of racial and ethnic minority patients with cancer with clinical trials. This is an important topic because racial and ethnic diversity in cancer clinical trials is low. This project will help us to understand difficulties patients have in joining clinical trials. It will also help us to understand reasons that make participating in a trial easier for patients. This project will allow patients to share their views on steps we can take to improve diversity in our trials. We will also compare feedback from medical oncologists and trial coordinators. This project will lead to the creation of an intervention to address to issues identified in this study. If successful, our goal will be to test out intervention in other settings.

Duane Mitchell, MD, PhD

Funded in Collaboration with the University of Florida Foundation

Brain cancer is now the leading cause of cancer-related death in children, due to the significant improvements in outcomes for children with more common cancers such as leukemia. This research proposal advances a novel immunotherapy treatment for medulloblastoma (MB), the most common malignant brain tumor in children. We have pioneered a treatment platform for pediatric brain tumors called adoptive cellular immunotherapy, which involves expanding tumor-reactive ‘killer T cells’ to large numbers outside of a patient and delivering these potent immune cells back to children with resistant brain tumors. This approach is currently undergoing evaluation in first-in-human clinical trials at our center. This project will advance this platform into a next generation approach that uses genomic technology to identify patient-specific antigens expressed in medulloblastoma tumors and specifically isolate and expand T cells recognizing these unique tumor targets (called neoantigens). If the objectives of this study are met, we will be able to significantly enhance the specificity and potency of an already promising platform and rapidly translate our findings into innovative clinical trials for children battling brain cancer.

Luisa Cimmino, PhD

Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation

Vitamins play an essential role in keeping our immune system healthy by maintaining normal blood cell production. Certain types of vitamins can also help in the prevention and treatment of blood cancers. Vitamin A has been used for decades to treat a subset of blood cancer patients with defects in a protein that relies on vitamin A for its normal activity. More recently, our work has shown that vitamin C can also stop blood cancers from forming, and slow cancer growth, by maintaining or restoring the activity of a protein known as TET2. Loss of TET2 function causes an increase in the growth of blood cells that drive cancer development. Mutations in TET2 that lower its activity are frequently found in patients with blood cancers. TET2 is also frequently defective in the blood cells of the healthy elderly population that can put them at a much greater risk of developing a blood cancer. The goal of our work is to understand how we can maintain TET2 activity to prevent and block cancers of the blood. Interestingly, vitamin A treatment can increase TET2 levels in cells, which in combination with vitamin C restores TET2 activity more than either treatment alone to stop the growth of blood cancer. Our goal in this study is to model combination treatment strategies of vitamin A and vitamin C to prevent blood cancer formation and growth that can be used as a potential therapy to treat blood cancer patients with a loss in TET2 activity.

Verline Justilien, PhD

FUNDED BY THE STUART SCOTT MEMORIAL CANCER RESEARCH FUND WITH SUPPORT FROM BRISTOL MYERS SQUIBB

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for the majority of lung cancer diagnoses and has a very low survival rate. There is a sub-population of cells within NSCLC tumors called cancer stem cells (CSCs) that are highly aggressive. These CSCs are capable of fueling the growth and metastasis of tumors and have been shown to be resistant to current drug treatments for NSCLC. Therefore, CSCs must be eliminated to effectively treat and gain lasting remission in patients with NSCLC. CSCs can communicate with other cells in a tumor by transferring information packaged within small particles called extracellular vesicles (EVs). We hypothesize that the molecules packaged within EVs from CSCs can make non-CSCs within NSCLC tumors more aggressive by increasing their ability to grow and metastasize. We propose to identify the molecules packaged within NSCLC CSC EVs. We also aim to block the function of the molecules within the CSC EVs to prevent the growth of NSCLC cancer cells. Completion of these studies will provide new information about how CSCs function to make NSCLC deadly. In addition, these studies will help in the design of new strategies to eliminate NSCLC CSCs which may provide effective, long-term treatment for NSCLC patients. 

Hatem Soliman, MD

Funded by Hooters of America, LLC

This goal of this project is to develop a new mobile application that will bring together multiple useful functions that will help breast cancer patients who are considering or participating in clinical trials. There are various applications in the market that may do one specific function but very few integrate both patient education resources with tools to help patients manage their participation on clinical trials. This includes keeping track of medication compliance, appointments, and side effects. All of these patient reported outcomes are critical for the successful completion of a clinical trial. A tool that can provide both information to breast cancer patients while helping them be compliant with the clinical trial needs could be a valuable tool as more patients depend on their smartphones and mobile devices on a daily basis.  

 

Lluis Morey, Ph.D.

Funded in partnership with Miami Dolphins Foundation

It is estimated that 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in the US. During the last decades, breast cancer survival rates have greatly improvedmainly due to factors such as earlier detection and a better understanding of the disease. There are at least five different type of breast cancer. In this proposal, we will investigate one of the breast cancer subtypes, called estrogen receptor positive (ER+) breast cancer. ER+ breast cancer needs the estrogen to grow. Estrogen is a hormone that is important for sexual and reproductive development, mainly in women. ER+ breast cancer accounts for 70% of breast cancers and is typically treated with drugs designed to slow or stop the growth of cancer that uses estrogen to develop. Although this type of therapy has been shown to reduce the risk of relapse and death from breast cancer, one third of patients develop resistance. This results in the spreading of cancer cells to other organsknown as metastasis. Thus, there is a critical need for identifying new treatments for patients who develop resistance to current therapies. The focus of this proposal is to understand the mechanisms of resistance to therapy and to overcome resistance by using a novel  therapeutic approach. This is the next step towards our overarching goal, which is the identification of new therapeutic opportunities for the treatment of patients with aggressive breast cancer. 

Vincent Luca, Ph.D.

Funded by the Constellation Gold Network Distributors

Over the past several years, immunotherapy has emerged as a highly effective treatment for cancer. In contrast to chemotherapy, which kills cancer cells with toxic chemicals, immunotherapy teaches a patient’s immune system to attack tumors. As current immunotherapy treatments are only successful in~ 30% of cases, scientists are actively searching for ways to create new classes of immunotherapy drugs. One promising treatment works by deactivating proteins that serve as “off-switches” for the immune system. However, we do not understand how several of these switches carry out their functions on the molecular level.

My research group is using two different methods to guide the development of next-generation immunotherapies. Our first strategy is to use a high-resolution imaging technique called x-ray crystallography to “see” how different types of off-switch proteins send signals. By visualizing these molecules on the atomic scale, our goal is to obtain molecular blueprints that can teach us how to design more effective drugs. For our second strategy, we will use these blueprints to create decoy proteins that can block incoming signals from reaching immune receptors. These decoys will then be used to prevent the natural off-switch proteins from shutting down the immune response. Initially, the decoys will be used to re-activate immune cells in a laboratory setting. However, if these tests are successful, our long-term goal is to proceed to clinical trials in melanoma patients.

Michael Zinner, M.D.

Funded by Hooters of America, LLC

The healthcare landscape has dramatically changed in South Florida, and we welcome you to be a partner in this transformation. Miami Cancer Institute at Baptist Health South Florida opened its doors in 2016 and is now seeing nearly 1,200 patients per day. The Institute, supported by a clinical and research alliance with Memorial Sloan Kettering, one of the leading academic cancer centers in the world, grants our patients access to the most advanced clinical trials for breast cancer. Patient accrual remains a huge challenge in clinical research, and the grant will go towards supporting recruitment for the important studies which in many cases, may give patients access to new therapies that are not yet readily available. The Institute will be proactive with the creation of recruitment materials as part of a well-coordinated campaign to address all aspects of enrollment as well as presenting information in an easy to understand and honest way including translation of all materials into Spanish. It is our goal to track enrollment efforts and adjust accordingly to what works best for our patient base and the community we serve. The mission of the breast clinical trial enrollment program is to provide innovative, patient centered cancer care through access to cutting edge treatments.

Hatem Soliman, M.D.

Funded by Hooters of America, LLC

Only a small percentage of patients with cancer in the US enroll on to clinical trials. This is creating a bottleneck for the development of new treatments.  Efforts to improve how patients are identified for clinical trials are important to overcome this problem.  One such effort which is showing promise is to use an individual known as a “pre-screener” to aid the clinical team in identifying eligible patients. The pre-screener functions as an extra set of eyes to review information generated from our electronic medical record as their records come in from referring physicians.  They will be trained to look for patients meeting certain eligibility criteria and then notify the clinical team about the matches ahead of their visit. This will allow the team to better prepare and notify the coordinator for the study to be available at that time. The pre-screener will also serve as a resource for patients using our clinical trial education center in the clinic waiting area to help them navigate through the available information to identify a potential trial option to discuss with their physician during their visit.

Mailing List Mailing List
Close Mailing List