Sangeeta Goswami, MD, PhD, CLIP Investigator The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Area of Research: Kidney Cancer Renal cell carcinoma (RCC) is a type of kidney cancer and is the eighth most common cancer in the United States. RCC, which spreads to different parts of the body, is called metastatic RCC. Only 12% of people diagnosed with metastatic RCC are alive at five years after diagnosis. Immune checkpoint therapy provides long-lasting responses, including cure in patients with metastatic RCC. However, only a subset of patients responds to immune checkpoint therapy. Therefore, there is a critical need to understand how to improve responses to immune checkpoint therapy to benefit more patients with metastatic RCC.Dr. Goswami and her team have shown that inhibiting an enzyme known as EZH2 can increase the efficacy of immune checkpoint therapy and improve survival in mice, and they’re currently conducting a clinical trial to test the safety and efficacy of the combination of EZH2 inhibitor and immune checkpoint therapy in patients. Now, Dr. Goswami proposes to study the effect of EZH2 inhibition on the immune cells in the blood and tumor samples collected from the patients enrolled in the trial. She will also perform laboratory studies to investigate whether tumor carrying specific alterations will show increased responses to the combination of EZH2 inhibitor plus immune checkpoint therapy. This will enable the selection of patients for the combination therapy. Overall, this project is an effort to ensure that more patients with metastatic RCC benefit from immune checkpoint therapy and achieve the remarkable results already seen in a subset of patients. Projects and Grants A study to investigate the role of epigenetic reprogramming in improving responses to immune checkpoint therapy in metastatic renal cell carcinoma The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center | Kidney Cancer | 2021
