December 21, 2022
Limei Shen, a research scientist at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, received the 2022 Vicky Amidon Innovation Grant in Lung Cancer Research award. This grant provides funding for her project which develops a new immunotherapy method to treat lung cancer patients. The Lung Cancer Initiative is providing funding for this project for $25,000 starting next year.
Shen is a research scientist in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Division of Pharmacoengineering and Molecular Pharmaceutics (DPMP). Her research is focused on cancer immunotherapy, a topic she has been working on since her Ph.D. project.
In her early studies, Shen saw that many non-small cell lung cancer or NSCLC patients had tumor types that did not respond to the common checkpoint inhibitor treatments. Shen found that about 26% of NSCLC patients were resistant to anti-PD therapies like checkpoint inhibitor treatments. These treatments do not kill the cancer cells directly, and instead block the tumor cells from reaching the immune system.
To account for these patients, Shen proposed a new method; using Siglec15 based bispecific AB to address NSCLC. The Siglec15 knockdown is known for stopping the proliferation, migration, and invasion of NSCLC cells, which is well suited for addressing this type of lung cancer.
With funding from the Lung Cancer Initiative, Shen plans to engineer modulators that can normalize immunosuppressive environments to enable enhanced therapy for NSCLC, while also creating a microenvironment suited for suppressing tumors. These are known as a biTEM or bispecific tumor-microenvironment modulators. Shen will also design antibodies which help evaluate whether these biTEMs would be more effective at suppressing tumors with the addition of a bispecific antibody.
For the future of her work, Shen is optimistic. “I hope my study and strategy could someday benefit clinic patients,” she said.
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