Walid Shaib, MD

Overview

Our aim is to identify immune pathways in pancreatic cancers that are significantly altered by treatment with conventional therapies. These findings will provide a rationale for subsequent preclinical or clinical studies utilizing conventional therapy along with novel immunotherapeutic approaches that modulate cellular immune responses in the pancreatic cancer microenvironment beyond PD-1 and CTLA-4 pathways. This is a novel proposal studying the effect of chemoradiation on immune markers, which will generate preliminary data to allow us to better target immune pathways. The data resulting from this analysis will be used to support an NCI grant application (R21/R01) to evaluate the mechanisms involved in these pathways using prospectively collected fresh tissue from resected pancreatic cancer patients. This project will enable us to further our understanding of approaches to combine conventional therapies with immune therapies in the pre-operative setting in pancreatic cancer. At the clinical level, the data can also be used to support an investigator-initiated trial evaluating specific agents targeting these immune pathways in patients with resectable or borderline resectable pancreatic cancer.