A team of researchers at the George Washington University (GW) Cancer Center, led by Rohan Fernandes, PhD, assistant professor of medicine at the immunotherapy to treat cancer. The goal: to increase the potency of immune checkpoint inhibitors, a class of immunotherapy that elicits dramatic benefits in only a modest subset of cancer patients, to a significantly larger proportion of patients.
Fernandes received more than $1.6 million from the National Institutes of Health for the study. His team will work with Prussian blue nanoparticles (PBNPs) coated with immunological signals, used in combination with checkpoint inhibitors. After elucidating the effects of PBNPs used for photothermal therapy on the tumor and adjacent immune cells, Fernandes will test the efficacy of the ensemble nanoimmunotherapy on tumor eradication and relapse prevention, and will evaluate the success of nanoimmunotherapy in treating disseminated cancer.
