Grant number: RP110319

Principal Investigator: Yong-Jun Liu, MD, PhD

Funding Organization: Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas

Project Start: December 1, 2011

Project End: November 30, 2013

Abstract:

Inflammation often represents an unsuccessful attempt of the immune system to control cancer growth. Even worse, cancer often encourages the immune system to mount “bad inflammation” that favors tumor growth/metastasis. Dendritic cells (DCs) are key regulators of the immune system and are capable of inducing different types of immune responses/inflammation. Even though breast tumors are infiltrated by plasmacytoid dendritic cells (pDCs), a DC subset specialized in generating anti-viral innate immunity, pDC infiltration is a poor prognosis factor in breast cancer. Our central hypothesis is that breast tumor cells inhibit the ability of pDCs to trigger potent anti-tumor responses and promote pDCs to induce anti-tumor immunosuppression allowing tumor progression.

Our goal is to understand the underlying molecular mechanisms of how pDC function is altered by human breast cancer cells, which will enable us to develop new strategies to reprogram pDCs from inducing “bad inflammation” to inducing effective anti-tumor immune responses, resembling anti-viral immunity, inside the tumor.