SU2C-Lustgarten Foundation Pancreatic Cancer Dream Team: Transforming Pancreatic Cancer to a Treatable Disease
Elizabeth M. Jaffee, MD
Deputy Director, The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins
Research
The pancreatic cancer tumor microenvironment (TME) plays a huge role in pancreatic cancer’s resistance to treatment. The team set out to examine the hypothesis that the immunosuppressive pancreatic cancer milieu can be reprogrammed into an immuno-stimulatory one to enable tumor rejection. They have conducted different clinical trials and established biomarkers of TME reprogramming with each trial, focusing on a novel immune suppressive pathway within the TME and stroma. More recently, they have started a phase I clinical trial on a neoantigen peptide vaccine that incorporates prioritized neoantigens and personalized mesothelin epitopes in pancreatic cancer patients.
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