Immunology, Systems Biology, and Immunotherapy of Breast Cancer

摘要

In year 4, the foundation we have built over the first three years of this award have enabled us to make substantial progress in multiple areas of this project. We now have an efficient system in place to recruit patients into this study and procure their samples, with a total of 240 subjects recruited to-date. Limited amounts of clinical materials available from each subject remains major challenges to the success of this project we continually attempt to address and solve this issue by reducing the cell numbers that we need for each assay. We have further enhanced and refined a powerful set of immunological assays and molecular tools to study these samples in greater detail than previously possible. We continue to uncover dramatic changes in the immune cell populations within tumors, TDLNs, and peripheral blood from breast cancer patients. These findings are reported above, and have led to a high profile publication in PNAS, with more to come in year 5. The coming final year of this award will see more progress and insights.