Sep 28: KWF grant for Jurgen Kuball for optimization of immune therapy in colon cancer
Professor of hematology Jurgen Kuball (CTI) receives a KWF consortium grant of more than € 1 million to optimize a new form of immunotherapy for colon cancer. In the coming years he will work on this with the Hubrecht Institute, the PMC and the University of Freiburg. They will focus on the innate immune system, a part of the immune system that is already present at birth and does not recognize genetic abnormalities.
The majority of colorectal cancers cannot be treated with currently available immune therapies. An alternative therapeutic opportunity for immune interventions against tumors arises from recent insight that daily cancer immune surveillance is executed not only by alpha beta T cells, but by multiple layers of the immune system. One layer consists of gamma delta (gd)T cells, which appear to be more potent than many other subpopulations. The major power of gdT cells is that they see cancer frequently not as a genetic, but as a metabolic disease. For instance, by sensing altered lipid pathways selectively active in cancer cells, gdT cells provide an alternative mechanism for detecting and eliminating cancer. Most importantly, our group showed that receptors expressed on gdT cells are able to distinguish between healthy and malignant leukemic stem cells, as a prototype for a cancer with a low mutational load, simply by detecting subtle changes in lipid metabolism.
We aim to characterize in this project more proteins involved in dissecting healthy and malignant cells through proteins expressed at the cell membrane of gdT cells and will use them to generate the next generation of “living drugs” . This will be accomplished by a multi-disciplinary team working at the UMC Utrecht, the Hubrecht Institute, Princess Maxima Centrum, and the University of Freiburg.