Hacking Immune Cells To Expand Their Therapeutic Potential

Congratulations once again to Max Foisey, this time for receiving the highly coveted PICI Scholar Grant. This early Career Researcher program has distributed 53 awards through 48 emerging investigators, with PICI deploying over $22.5 million since 2016 to advance high-impact immunotherapy research. Max’s research focuses on how novel hybrid synthetic receptors deliver immunomodulatory payloads, enhancing solid tumor T-cell therapy..   He plans to build upon his current work in the Roybal Lab, which focuses on leveraging synthetic biology to enhance CAR T-cell therapies for solid tumors, an area with great unmet need.

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Lindsey Draper MD received the ASCO Conquer Cancer Young Investigator Award for the 2024-2025 academic year.  Go Lindsey!  Conquer Cancer’s grants and awards support oncology professionals at every career stage, including medical students and residents, to help accelerate breakthroughs in research and build an oncology workforce that more fully represents the diverse population affected by cancer. As a member of the 2024 class, Lindsey plans to use the funding to advance her research of Tumor Infiltrating Lymphocytes (TIL) as a treatment for ovarian cancer.

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Congratulations to Max Foisey and Adi Jangid for winning Gladstone seed grants.  Max will use the funding to advance a CRISPR screen of tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) in collaboration with members of the Carnevale Lab.  Adi is building a platform for synthetic cell to cell communication.  These are both innovative and exciting areas of research and we are excited to see the results!

Ziad Kedkad was awarded best talk at the annual RadiologyResearch Conference. His research of locoregional T cell therapies for the treatment of unresectable tumors was lead by Jaehoon Shin MD, PhD  a Roybal Lab post-doc.  Nice work Ziad!

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We are excited to announce that our unique approach to improving T cell function has been published by Nature! Our strategy fights tumors by taking advantage of the natural selection of cancer itself. By testing a library of naturally occurring T cell mutations, we identified a gene fusion of CARD11–PIK3R3 that when paired with CAR T cells greatly improves their accumulation and antitumor efficacy. Years in the making, this project was a collaboration with the Choi Lab at Northwestern. It was driven by Roybal Lab members Julie Garcia, Jay Daniels, Iowis Zhu, Casey Burnett and many others. There is much more to this story! For an overview check out this article, for the full publication click here.

After six years of service as a member researcher at The Parker Center for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), Dr. Kole Roybal, has been appointed to the role of Center Director for PICI at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Roybal succeeds founding Center Director, Dr. Lewis Lanier, PhD, following his retirement, and will join Dr. Lawrence Fong, MD, Center Co-Director in the continued leadership and direction of the PICI at UCSF site.  Congratulations Kole!