Physician-scientist Theodore Scott Nowicki, MD, PhD, an assistant professor-in-residence of pediatric hematology/oncology and microbiology, immunology, & molecular genetics at the , has been awarded a $4.5 million R37 MERIT Award to help improve the effectiveness of cellular therapies for solid tumors.
Cellular immunotherapies, like TCR-T and CAR-T cell therapies, work by reprogramming a patient’s own immune cells to find and destroy cancer. While they’ve had great success in treating some cancers, particularly blood cancers, they don’t always work as well for solid tumors. In many cases, the cancer returns after treatment.
Nowicki, who is also a member of the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and his team have found that T cells are more effective at killing cancer cells when they produce higher levels of a molecule called TNF-alpha. TNF-alpha helps T cells mount a stronger attack against cancer and reduces certain immune cells called Th2 cells that can weaken the immune response.
To boost this effect, Nowicki and his team engineered a new “supercharged” version of T cells, designed to produce extra TNF-alpha, but only when they recognize and engage with cancer cells.
The new funding will help Nowicki test these enhanced T cells in preclinical models to see how well they fight different types of cancers and whether they will stay effective over time.
“If successful, this work can lead to lead to more powerful and precise cancer treatments in the future,” said Nowicki. “Importantly, these benefits would be without any additional toxicity.”
The R37 MERIT Award is given to early-career scientists with the highest-scoring R01 grant proposals and provides up to seven years of research funding, two years beyond the standard five-year R01 grant period, to offer promising investigators greater stability to pursue innovative, high-impact research.
