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New Mesothelioma Research Funding Awarded by Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation

new mesothelioma research funding

The Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation is proud to announce the recipients of its most recent round of new mesothelioma research funding. Through a rigorous review process that spanned over six months and involved a scientific peer review by the members of the Science Advisory Board of the organization, as well as a community review by members of the Community Advisory Board, three promising research projects were chosen for funding.

The projects will be awarded $300,000, bringing the organization’s total research funded to date to $11.1 million and total projects funded to 117. All funded projects can be reviewed on the Foundation’s website.

“The resources for our research program, just like the rest of the funding for the Foundation, come from patients, family members, friends, those who have lost a loved one to mesothelioma, and our community fundraisers,” said Julie Powers, Executive Director, Mesothelioma Applied Research Foundation.

The following three projects rose to the top out of 36 proposals and were approved for funding by the Foundation’s Board of Directors.

Identifying novel Treg targets to sensitize mesothelioma to immune checkpoint blockade
Joachim Aerts, MD, PhD, Erasmus University Medical Center
Dr. Aerts is a veteran mesothelioma researcher from the Netherlands with dozens of peer-reviewed publications under his belt. This project seeks to answer questions surrounding one very particular aspect of immunotherapy: the regulatory T cells (also known as Tregs). Immunotherapy has been a very hopeful area of progress for mesothelioma. However, while some patients show remarkable responses to this therapy, most don’t. In order to understand who responds and why, and to then be able to apply that knowledge to make the non-responders also respond, researchers have looked at various parts of the immune system for answers. One of the reasons for this lack of response in some patients is thought to be tied to the regulatory T cells. As it turns out, immunotherapy activates both the immune system AND the regulatory T cells. The activation of regulatory T cells, in turn, inactivates the immune system thus canceling out its actual intended therapeutic effect. In this project, investigators will try to better understand the role of immunotherapy on the regulatory T cells with the goal of developing a treatment that, when combined with immunotherapy, would activate the immune system without activating the immune-suppressing regulatory T cells.

Radiation-induced vascular remodeling to boost immunotherapy outcomes
Alistair Cook, PhD, University of Western Australia (UWA)
This study, like the previous one, seeks to answer questions related to the disparate efficacy of immunotherapy. In this project, investigators will use knowledge derived from preclinical experiments that low dose radiation used prior to immunotherapy can boost the effect of the latter. Along these lines they will seek to better understand three specific areas.

  1. They will analyze the alterations caused by radiation at the tumor microenvironment level.
  2. They will define the window of time following irradiation when immunotherapy is most effective.
  3. The will identify biomarkers that will help clinicians identify which tumors are more sensitive to immunotherapy based on the changes caused by radiation.

This information will be useful in clinic and will help investigators as they develop a future clinical trial testing low dose radiotherapy plus immunotherapy.

Reactivation of mesothelial progenitor genes in mesothelioma
Christian Mosimann, PhD, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Dr. Mosimann and his research group at the University of Colorado have been researching various basic processes of disease development by observing zebrafish. Through their work they identified that a protein called Hand2, which is typically implicated in telling cells to grow and divide, and which typically becomes inactivated in adulthood, becomes reactivated in mesothelioma tumors. Through this study, investigators seek to accomplish two main aims.

  1. They want to understand what instruction the Hand2 protein is actually giving mesothelioma cells.
  2. They want to test the effect of switching off the Hand2 protein on mesothelioma tumors.

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