Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) remains one of the deadliest cancers worldwide, with limited response rates to current T-cell-boosting immunotherapies. About two-thirds of patients with HCC have impaired activity in another immune cell type called dendritic cells (DCs). “This makes targeting DCs a promising and underexplored avenue in HCC,” says Dr. Katherine Lindblad.
Dr. Lindblad’s project will focus on a unique activation state of DCs, called hyperactivated (hDCs). Unlike conventional DC activation, hDCs exhibit superior migration, cytokine secretion, and memory T-cell induction. She will establish a rules-based platform for leveraging hDC behavior and assess their potential to induce protective T-cell responses. These findings could inform next-generation DC-based immunotherapies not only for HCC, but across multiple cancer types. Dr. Lindblad’s personal experiences instilled in her “an insatiable drive to understand the defining features of ‘healthy’ and the etiology of disease.” While she had a long-standing interest in translational biomedical research, it was clinical trial work at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute that led her to commit to a career in cancer immunology research. “[It] gave me a profound appreciation for the impact of bench-to-bedside science. Sample 10 was never just a number – but a person, a family, pain, and hope.” Dr. Lindblad subsequently completed her PhD at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, with a focus on how tumor-intrinsic genetics shape immunity in liver cancer.
Sponsor
Jonathan Kagan, PhD
Research Focus
Hepatocellular carcinoma, dendritic cells, innate immunity
Projects and Grants
Hijacking dendritic cell-intrinsic NLRP3 inflammasome to drive protective immunity in liver cancer
