Harvard Catalyst Profiles

Swiss National Science Foundation

Tumour Derived Vaccine Adjuvants for Advanced Cancers

Role Description: The overall goal of the project is to develop a novel approach of tumour derived vaccine adjuvants for cancer immunotherapy. The proposal leverages on the key findings on the involvement of the nucleic acids including noncoding RNA in innate immunity and the facts that chemical synthesized, or bacterial nucleic acid vaccine adjuvants elicited striking tumor suppression. These discoveries shed the light that aberrantly expressed non-coding RNA initiated upon chromosome damage due to the replicative stress during the cancer progression or genotoxic agent treatment could potentially trigger cancer cell-autonomous innate immunity for anti-cancer therapy. This proposal will take advantage of CRISPR activation screen platform, etc to investigate whether boosting the expression of tumour derived non-coding RNAs striving in genomic integrity maintenance in advanced cancers will make cancer cells self-exposed to or ‘visualized’ by innate immune surveillance and this novel noncoding RNA adjuvant may represent a breakthrough for the therapeutic vaccination against cancer.

Role: Research Fellow