Funded Grants

SEED GRANT

Grantee: Weill Cornell Medicine
Project Lead: Claire VanPouille-Box, PHD
Grant Title: Regulation of myeloid cells by fatty acid metabolism in irradiated Glioblastoma 
Program Area: Glioblastoma
Grant Type: UKF Seed Grant
Year Awarded: 2023
Amount: $50,000
Duration: 1 year

Summary: Glioblastoma (GBM) is a brain cancer that affects adults and children and cannot currently be cured. Over 15 years, more and more patients will be diagnosed with GBM while no advances in care have been achieved. Thus, more people will die from GBM in the future. Radiation therapy (RT), in which the tumor is hit with a targeted beam of radiation to kill cancer cells, is one of the standards of care for GBM and is often the only option for brain tumors that cannot be surgically removed. In multiple cancers, RT acts as a vaccine that starts an immune response against cancer. When activated against cancer cells, the body’s immune system is a very powerful anti-cancer therapy. However, GBMs inevitably return, suggesting that RT fails to sustain anti-tumor immunity. Understanding why RT is incapable of stimulating the immune system against GBM is critical to developing long-lasting brain cancer treatments that will exploit the patient’s own immune system to kill cancer cells. It is well-known that brain cancers do not have a lot of immune cells to fight against GBM, which makes it difficult for immunotherapy to work. Our preliminary data show that RT of brain cancers increases the production of lipids via the fatty acid synthase (FASN) to prevent immune activation and support tumor progression.

So, we think that stopping FASN will prevent the production of lipids in irradiated GBM, and this in turn will deny GBM cells the protection against the immune system. As a result, we predict that blocking FASN will augment tumor cell kill and stimulate the immune system against the tumor. Overall, this project aims to validate FASN targeting as a novel treatment strategy to unleash anti-tumor immunity in irradiated GBM.