2 minute read
Conquering Cancer
BY MERRY SUE BAUM
Pingping Hou, PhD, is not satisfied with the odds when it comes to pancreatic cancer. An assistant professor in both the Center of Cell Signaling and the Department of Microbiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics, she knows that only 10 percent of those diagnosed with the disease will be alive in five years. She’s working hard to change that statistic.
Hou recently received a $3.5 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to support her work in novel cell therapy for pancreatic cancer. Her lab is engineering novel multifaceted cells that will become weapons and fight against the cancer cells. These cells will be able to migrate inside the tumor and engage other immune cells to join in the battle.
Hou believes that the disease is not only in the malignant tumor, but also in the cells surrounding the tumor, known as the microenvironment. Cancer cells educate the immune cells and stomal cells surrounding the tumor to become complicit in the cancer process. Hou’s lab has discovered the novel pathways that enable this to happen. Understanding these key communication networks that poison the neighborhood, she says, will prevent therapy resistance and/or tumor relapse.
“We’re hoping to remodel the microenvironment so that other immune cells can work cooperatively to attack the cancer cells,” she says. “We have almost completed the in vitro portion of our experiment and will soon be injecting these cells in tumor-bearing mice. I am very anxious to translate my research into therapies for patients suffering from this horrible disease.”
Hou has received numerous awards for her work, including the 2021 National Cancer Institute K22 Career Development Award, the 2022 AACR-Lustgarten Foundation Career Development Award, the 2023 New Investigator Award from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey, and the 2023 HealthXpress Award from Rutgers University.
The Center for Cell Signaling is a basic and translational research center at NJMS, directed by Raymond Birge, PhD, professor and vice chair, Department of Microbiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics and director of the Center for Cell Signaling. Research there spans a number of disciplines, from biochemistry, biophysics, and molecular biology, to cell death, to zebrafish and model organisms, as well as aging and neurodegeneration. ●
For more information on the Center for Cell Signaling, visit njms.rutgers.edu/ccs.
