Katelyn T. Byrne, PhD

Overview

Aim: Treatment / Therapy

Pancreatic cancer is an aggressive and difficult-to-treat tumor type that does not respond well to standard treatments. Using the patient’s immune system to target tumors is an appealing approach that has worked in many other cancer types, but still difficult to achieve in pancreatic cancer.

We are studying proteins that may act as barriers to therapy response, keeping cancer-killing immune cells from fully attacking pancreatic tumors. One such protein, called PSGL-1, is commonly expressed by killer immune cells in pancreatic cancer, and works to shut off the function of the killer immune cells. Using a mouse model of pancreatic cancer, we plan to block the ability of PSGL-1 to target immune cells, which has been shown to rescue killer functions in other tumors, to see if this will be more effective in controlling pancreatic cancer growth. We will also combine PSGL-1 blockade with other immune-stimulating therapies that our laboratory has developed to promote improved tumor control. Finally, we will evaluate patient pancreatic tumor samples to determine if some of the signals from the mouse model that predict response to PSGL-1 blockade are present in human samples. Overall, this project will investigate the immune-biology in the tumor site to reveal how targeting PSGL-1 contributes to tumor control, and evaluate new potential immune therapies for patients with pancreatic cancer.