02 Oct 2023
Research delving into T cell responses to cancer receives funding from the US
The University of Melbourne’s Dr Daniel Utzschneider, Laboratory Head at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute), has been awarded an Investigator Research Grant from the Leukemia Research Foundation (US) for his research project titled “Identifying and targeting regulators of T cell exhaustion to promote leukemia control”.
Major advancements in the past decades have revolutionised cancer immunotherapy. While these therapies have been a game-changer for the treatment of many types of cancers, they’re not as effective for blood cancers like Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) – the most common type of leukemia in the Western world. To this day, CLL is still considered incurable, underscoring the urgent need to find new treatments to improve health outcomes for CLL patients.
An expert in T cell biology, Dr Utzschneider focuses on CD8+ T cell immunity and responses to viral infections and tumours. Over the past years, together with collaborators, he discovered the mechanisms leading to T cell exhaustion and how they are sustained during chronic infection and in cancer - a paradigm shift in the field of T cell immunity. Dr Utzschneider is harnessing this knowledge to design and develop new treatments to facilitate a cure for leukemia patients.
“One of the challenges with cancer is that our immune system, specifically T cells, become weakened or "exhausted" in fighting against it, which allows the disease to progress,” explained Dr Utzschneider.
“Our main focus for this project is to find the "kryptonite" that exhausts and hinders T cells from doing their job effectively and target it to restore the full potential, or superpowers, of T cells in fighting cancer.”
The team will use a state-of-the-art genome sequencing technology, called CRISPR/Cas9, to identify the factors that limit the function of T cells and impact their response to cancer. Once characterised, these important factors could be used as targets for treatment that boost leukemia-specific T cell responses.
“This work will significantly expand our understanding of T cell immunity and may well lay the foundation for the development of new immunotherapies – that can be used alone or in combination with existing treatments – to improve clinical health outcomes for blood cancer patients,” said Dr Utzschneider.
Dr Conor Kearney, Head of Molecular Immunology Laboratory at the Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute and a collaborator on this project, concurred.
“Daniel has paired new powerful in vivo models to assess T cell function in response to chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a research area that is less advanced compared to research on solid cancer. I strongly believe that disease outcomes for this cancer will highly profit from his work in the near future,” said Dr Kearney.
About the Leukemia Research Foundation
The Leukemia Research Foundation is an American nonprofit focused exclusively on funding leukemia research. To date, they have invested millions in more than 600 research projects worldwide to accelerate the development of new and better treatments and an ultimate cure for leukemia.
The New Investigator Research Grant Program supports early-career investigators who propose highly innovative research projects with the potential to impact broad, essential areas of leukemia research. The Foundation provides grants of up to $150k over a two-year period for new investigator research projects.