Cancer Nexus Blog

The UMass Cancer Center Pilot Grant Program fosters exciting science and innovation in cancer research at UMass Chan Medical School. The goal of the program is to provide support for cancer discoveries at their earliest phase, and facilitate further development of projects to a stage when they can obtain external support.

In its inaugural year, The UMass Cancer Center Pilot Grant Program awarded funds for three projects. One of the awards was for a study entitled "Nanoparticle delivery of innate immune agonists to remodel the tumor microenvironment and potentiate T cell-activating therapies in PDAC", which is being conducted as a cross-campus collaboration between Marcus Ruscetti, PhD, assistant professor of molecular, cell & cancer biology at UMass Chan Medical School, and Prabhani Atukorale, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UMass Amherst. The project seeks to improve treatment of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (or PDAC), the most common form of pancreatic cancer, a devastating disease that lacks effective treatment options. Notably, immunotherapies, which have been the focus of cancer therapy for the past 10 years, have not been particularly effective in treating pancreatic cancer.

The funded pilot project is taking a unique approach that uses nanoparticle technology to try to improve immunotherapy for pancreatic cancer. Instead of adopting a traditional single-minded approach that focuses only on the adaptive immune response (which activates T cells to fight a tumor), the pilot project will use a more comprehensive approach by combining an innate immune-activating platform developed in Dr. Atukorale’s lab with an adaptive immune-activating platform from Dr. Ruscetti’s lab. Regarding their collaboration, Dr. Ruscetti says, "We come from different disciplines. Prabhani is doing bioengineering and nanoparticles, and engineering new ways to deliver drugs, especially innate immune agonists which you can’t deliver systemically. We’re focused on ways to target the tumor and the genetics of the tumor, so we can bring both of our expertise together to tackle a common problem, which is, How do you treat and activate the immune system in pancreatic cancer?".

Watch Drs. Atukorale and Ruscetti discuss the funded pilot project below.