LAUSR

Description A mechanistic approach to overcoming treatment resistance reveals new targets In the past decade, cancer treatment has been revolutionized by the rise of checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies. Traditional approaches to treating cancer have been focused on developing an increasingly sophisticated arsenal of drugs that are targeted against various mechanisms of tumor cell growth. With immunotherapy, the capacity of the human immune system to recognize self and nonself has been harnessed to activate the antitumor immune response in a way that can be broadly applied across many tumor types, regardless of their growth mechanisms (1). Nonetheless, many patients remain nonresponsive to immunotherapy and reliable predictors of therapy failure are lacking (1, 2), which have motivated a shotgun approach to improving outcomes. At present, hundreds of clinical trials attempt to combine immunotherapy with other treatments and boost its efficacy, with mixed results. In my research, I focus on a more systematic approach for both discovering the cell-cell interactions involved in immunotherapy resistance within different tumor types and identifying candidate therapies to overcome treatment resistance.