Pancreatic cancer is still one of the most lethal cancers, in part, because it has spread or metastasized by the time it is diagnosed. One common site of metastasis for pancreatic tumors is the liver where effective therapy is limited. While there are now effective therapies that harness the immune system to fight cancer, a type of treatment called immunotherapy, they are largely ineffective in pancreatic cancer. Understanding the reasons why pancreatic tumors are resistant to immunotherapy is an important topic for researchers that mainly focuses on the microenvironment in the pancreas, the site of the primary tumor. Because pancreatic tumors frequently spread to the liver, an organ with many types of immune cells , Julienne Carstens, PhD, an Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Heersink School of Medicine and a 2024 Hirshberg Foundation Seed Grant recipient, has set out to understand how signals between pancreatic tumor cells and immune cells in the liver allow for liver metastasis. A more detailed understanding of this process can inform the development of treatments to reverse or prevent liver metastasis from occurring.
Dr. Carstens’s project, Defining the cancer cell regulators of immunity enabling cancer liver metastasis, utilizes preclinical models of pancreatic cancer with and without the ability to spread to the liver. She aims to identify the chemical signals released by tumor cells that regulate metastasis and which immune cells in the liver these signals act upon to facilitate metastasis. By comparing genes expressed by cancer cells to publicly available patient datasets, the group identified multiple targets expressed by cancer cells that could be involved in liver metastasis. Current work in the lab focuses on validating these targets in preclinical models. Additionally, Dr. Carstens’s lab identified communication between cancer cells and populations of immune cells in the liver, specifically T cells, and that loss of T cells enabled liver metastasis to occur. They are now working to characterize the tumor microenvironment in the liver metastases by imaging techniques with a staining panel they developed to identify and visualize which types of immune cells are present in the liver metastasis and how they interact with cancer cells. The overarching goal of this project is to identify the mechanisms used by pancreatic cancer cells for liver-specific T cell suppression to inform therapeutic designs that overcome this suppression to prevent or reverse liver metastasis.
The progress achieved by Dr. Carstens’s research was showcased in three posters at the 2025 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Special Conference on Advances in Pancreatic Cancer Research, a poster at the 2026 Metastasis Research Society, and an upcoming oral presentation at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer. Additionally, a manuscript is under review detailing key findings from this research project. We look forward to welcoming Dr. Carstens to present her work at the Hirshberg Foundation-UCLA Research Forum on Pancreatic Cancer Research 2026.
