UNC Lineberger member Chad Pecot, MD, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine, was awarded an RO1 grant to support research into the roles of the immune tumor microenvironment in lung squamous metastasis.
The National Institutes of Health has awarded UNC Lineberger’s Chad Pecot, MD, a five-year, $2 million RO1 grant to support his research into the treatment of squamous cell lung cancer metastasis.
Although many advances in targeted therapies have improved outcomes in lung adenocarcinoma, these have been ineffective in lung squamous carcinoma. Recent studies, however, have shown that treating lung squamous carcinomas with an immune checkpoint inhibitor that targets the PD1 protein generated an improved survival benefit in about 20 percent of the patients. This represents the first real advance in the second most common type of lung cancer in several decades.
Pecot will study the immune regulation of lung squamous metastasis, with a focus on how the tumors recruit inflammatory monocytes, a type of immune cell, into the tumors’ microenvironment. They also will evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of targeting these immune cells and whether this therapeutic approach is synergistic in combination with immune checkpoint inhibitors.
“As a lung cancer specialist, I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with our lack of knowledge about how lung squamous cancers spread,” said Pecot, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the UNC School of Medicine. “I’m very excited about this grant because it will allow us to begin uncovering how this is occurring, as well as to develop new therapies to combat the process.”
Pecot will collaborate with Neil Hayes, MD, MPH, formerly of UNC Lineberger and now at the University of Tennessee West Institute for Cancer Research, who will focus on bioinformatics analyses of lung squamous cancer genetics and with UNC Lineberger’s Gianpietro Dotti, MD, who will aid in the development of a CAR T-cell therapy that targets inflammatory monocytes.