Traditional cancer therapies often rely on a single drug to do the job, but tumors are complex ecosystems filled with different types of cells interacting in intricate ways. Knowing this, Drs. Allon Wagner, Alexis Combes, Arpita Desai, and Matthew Krummel are rethinking how to fight cancer by shifting the focus from one big punch to a series of well-timed nudges. Their bold idea: what if we could gently steer that ecosystem back to health?
Together the team is developing “nudge drugs” – treatments that may not work alone, but when given in a smart sequence, help reawaken the immune system and gradually push the tumor environment toward lasting tumor control. They will use tumor samples from patients with kidney cancer to test how the tissue responds to different drugs and map out the many possible “states” a tumor can move through.
Dr. Wagner, Combes, Desai, Krummel will then train an algorithm to predict which drug combinations might best guide the tumor toward a state the immune system can defeat. This nuanced, data-driven strategy aims to transform how cancer is treated by working with the body’s natural defenses, one smart step at a time
Research Focus
Kidney cancer, combination therapy, machine learning
Projects and Grants
Towards nudge drugs: An iterative, integrated computational and experimental pipeline for discovery of immune-checkpoint blockade nudge drug candidates
