Research Database

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Early Detection Award
Claudio Scafoglio, MD, PhD
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

The protein SGL2 seems to be produced in higher quantities on abnormal lung cells than on normal lung cells. Dr. Scafoglio is testing whether SGL2 can be used to image lung cancer cells by using a new imaging technology.

Career Development Award
Erin Schenk, MD, PhD
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
This grant was funded in part by The Huff Project

Fusion-driven NSCLC is a group of lung cancers that are driven by specific changes in oncogenes. These lung cancers tend to be addicted to these oncogenes. Such fusion-driven NSCLCs are treated with targeted therapies that block the effect of the oncogenes. However, the cancer inevitably comes back because the tumors become resistant. Traditionally, fusion-driven NSCLCs have not been successfully treated with immunotherapy. Dr. Schenk is testing how these cancers can be treated with immunotherapy through another immune pathway—the innate immunity pathway.

Health Equity for Communities Research Award
Matthew Triplette, MD, MPH
University of Washington/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) community faces several health disparities, including a higher rate of lung cancer due to increased rates of tobacco use in this group. Dr. Triplette will partner with an urban LGBTQ community center to create and evaluate a tailored lung cancer screening and smoking cessation navigation program to specifically address the needs of this community. By directly partnering with stakeholders and community members, he plans to develop a sustainable program that will assist LGBTQ community members with both screening and cessation that can then be disseminated to improve the health of LGBTQ patients across the country.

Early Detection Award
Anil Vachani, MD
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Currently, low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) is the only tool for the screening and early detection of lung cancer in individuals who meet screening criteria. LDCT is not very sensitive; often, abnormalities identified in an LDCT scan turn out to be benign. However, ruling out cancer requires an invasive biopsy. Dr. Vachani is testing whether a biomarker signature can be integrated into LDCT screening to improve the sensitivity of LDCT so that patients may be spared unnecessary biopsies.

EGFR Resisters / LUNGevity Research Award
Helena Yu, MD
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

As a mechanism of resistance to EGFR inhibitors, cancers can change histology from adenocarcinoma to small cell or squamous cell lung cancer. Once this happens, EGFR inhibitors are no longer effective treatment; there are no strategies currently available to prevent or reverse transformation after it has occurred. Dr. Yu will use advanced molecular techniques to identify genetic changes that contribute to transformation. Understanding these genetic changes will identify biomarkers that can be utilized to develop treatments to prevent and reverse transformation.

Career Development Award
Kathryn Arbour, MD
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

Dr. Arbour will test a combination treatment regimen (MRTX849 for KRAS G12C and TNO155 for SHP2) in specialized mouse models of KRAS-mutant lung cancer, as well as analyze blood samples from patients who are currently receiving the MRTX849 drug to proactively monitor how these patients are developing resistance to MRTX849. Her ultimate goal is for new drugs, such as TNO155, to be added to the treatment regimen for KRAS-positive patients to combat acquired resistance. Dr. Arbour is the recipient of the Kristie Rolke Smith/LUNGevity Career Development Award, generously funded by the Rolke family in memory of their daughter, Kristie.

ALK Positive
Mark Awad, MD, PhD
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA
Roberto Chiarle, MD
Harvard University, Cambridge , MA
ALK Positive
Ibiayi Dagogo-Jack, MD
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA
Career Development Award
Carl Gay, MD, PhD
The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX

Dr. Gay and his team will test an immunotherapy-DNA damage response (DDR) inhibitor combination therapy in SCLC patients and validate a biomarker profile. Dr. Gay’s research aims to develop a new drug therapy combination and determine which patients are likely to benefit from it. 

ALK Positive
A. John Iafrate, MD. PhD
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA
Liron Bar-Peled, PhD
Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA
Career Development Award
Sean Pitroda, MD
The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL

Dr. Pitroda and his team will develop a biomarker signature that can predict which patients are the most likely to benefit from an immunotherapy-radiation therapy combination. The ultimate goal is to determine which patients are likely to benefit from this combination treatment.

Career Development Award
Joshua Bauml, MD
Perelman School of Medicine—University of Pennsylvania, Abramson Cancer Center, Philadelphia, PA

The lung cancer treatment landscape is rapidly evolving with the advent of immunotherapy. Now, three checkpoint inhibitors are available in the first-line and second-line settings for certain subsets of patients with advanced-stage NSCLC. Despite this promise, a large subset of patients treated with immunotherapy will not respond to these drugs. This lack of response may be attributed to immune suppressive mechanisms, such as interferon signaling.

Dr. Joshua Bauml’s laboratory is studying pathways that block interferon signaling, such as the JAK-STAT pathway. He proposes to conduct a phase II combination clinical trial (the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab with the JAK-STAT pathway inhibitor itacitinib) in patients with advanced-stage NSCLC. Dr. Bauml postulates that the combination regimen will remove the immune suppressive effects of interferon signaling and enhance the action of pembrolizumab. He will also be collecting tumor and blood samples during the course of the trial and characterize these samples to identify molecular predictors of response in patients.

Career Development Award
Wei-Chu Victoria Lai, MD
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY

Small cell lung cancer (SCLC) comprises 15% of all diagnosed cases of lung cancer. It usually responds to initial chemotherapy; however, it inevitably becomes resistant to the chemotherapy and progresses. Identifying strategies to reverse chemoresistance in SCLC continues to be an unmet need.

SCLC cells produce high amounts of a protein called EZH2. This protein helps SCLC cells escape the effects of chemotherapy. DS-3201b is a drug that blocks the effects of EZH2. Dr. Lai will conduct a phase 1 clinical trial with DS-3201b in patients with extensive-stage SCLC receiving chemotherapy. The goal of the trial is to determine whether addition of DS-3201b to chemotherapy prevents the development of chemoresistance in SCLC patients. 

Career Development Award
Aaron Lisberg, MD
University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA

Currently, three immune checkpoint inhibitors are approved by the FDA for the treatment of advanced-stage NSCLC. Recently, an immunotherapy-chemotherapy combination regimen has shown to be effective in both advanced-stage squamous and non-squamous NSCLC patients. Despite this promise, immunotherapy works only in a subset of patients with advanced-stage NSCLC. There remains an unmet need to improve immunotherapy modalities such that a larger patient population may benefit from this novel treatment regimen. One hypothesis is that current checkpoint inhibitors do not work in all patients because specialized immune cells called T-cells (the target of immune checkpoint inhibitors) are unable to home in on their tumors (these tumors are referred to as “cold” tumors).

Dr. Aaron Lisberg is studying a novel combination immunotherapy approach—administering a checkpoint inhibitor, pembrolizumab, with genetically modified immune cells derived from a patient. Dendritic cells are immune cells that help other immune cells such as T-cells in identifying and homing in on a cancer. Dr. Lisberg’s laboratory will genetically manipulate a patient’s dendritic cells to artificially produce a protein called CCL21 (CCL21-DCs). He proposes that combining these CCL21-DCs will help recruit T cells to a patient’s tumor and make them responsive to the immune checkpoint inhibitor (turning a cold tumor into a hot one).

ALK Positive
Mark Awad, MD, PhD
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston, MA
This grant was funded by ALK Positive
ALK Positive
Justin Gainor, MD
Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA
This grant was funded by ALK Positive
ALK Positive
Raphael Nemenoff, PhD
University of Colorado Denver, Aurora, CO
This grant was funded by ALK Positive
Career Development Award
Kellie Smith, PhD
Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD

Checkpoint inhibitors, a type of immunotherapy, are now available in the first-line and second-line settings for certain subsets of NSCLC patients. Furthermore, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved an immunotherapy-combination treatment regimen for the treatment of a subset of advanced-stage NSCLC patients. While we are making progress in combining and sequencing immunotherapy with other conventional treatments, it is still unclear which patients will respond to these combinations. Dr. Kellie Smith’s laboratory is studying immune cells in blood samples from patients who have received the recently approved combination therapy. She postulates that immune cells from patients receiving the combination behave very differently from immune cells from patients who have received single-agent immunotherapy. Dr. Smith’s team will identify and exploit these differences to develop a blood test that will help predict which patients may benefit from combination therapies, thereby sparing patients the exposure to ineffective treatments.

Career Development Award
Jeffrey Thompson, MD
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Currently, three immune checkpoint inhibitors are approved by the FDA for the treatment of a subset of advanced-stage NSCLC. However, immunotherapy is a costly treatment regimen and comes with a unique side effect profile because of the inhibitors’ ability to cause inflammatory tissue damage. At present, the PD-L1 protein is used as a biomarker to predict which patients may respond to immunotherapy. Unfortunately, presence or absence of PD-L1 protein may not be an accurate predictor of response. Dr. Jeffrey Thompson is studying how we can develop more accurate biomarker signatures that may not only predict response to immunotherapy but may also determine which patients will develop treatment-related side effects. He will develop a novel blood-based liquid biopsy approach that will enable doctors to predict which patients will respond to immunotherapy drugs.

Career Development Award
Edwin Yau, MD, PhD
Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY
This grant was funded in part by Schmidt Legacy Foundation and Upstage Lung Cancer

Currently,  computed tomography (CT) is available as a tool for the early detection of lung cancer in high-risk individuals. Unfortunately, it has a high false-positive rate: less than 5% of people with nodules found through CT actually have lung cancer. Apart from the distress associated with false positives, individuals may have to undergo invasive procedures, such as a biopsy, to rule out lung cancer.

Circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA) is DNA released from dying cancer cells into the bloodstream. Individuals with early-stage lung cancer may have ctDNA in their blood, even when the cancer is localized. CRISPR-Cas technology is a novel DNA modifying tool that can be used to develop sensitive, specific, and economic ctDNA assays. Dr. Edwin Yau will develop a CRISPR-Cas-based blood test to detect ctDNA in the blood of individuals suspected of having lung cancer. While the immediate goal of the project is to evaluate this blood test in individuals who have already undergone a CT scan, the ultimate goal of the project is to develop a blood test for screening all individuals.