Immunotherapy has provided new hope for a permanent cure for some cancers, but as few as 20 percent of patients treated with immunotherapy ultimately respond to the treatment. And some types of cancer — like breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancers — typically don’t respond at all.
Physician scientist Dr. Wen Jiang hopes to engage the immune system using nanomaterials to combat immune-therapy–resistant cancers. He plans to start with some of the most intractable, including treatment-resistant and metastatic breast cancers.
Dr. Jiang was recruited in 2018 from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he was a resident in radiation oncology, to The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. A First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT enabled this promising young researcher to remain in Texas.
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Immunotherapy has provided new hope for a permanent cure for some cancers, but as few as 20 percent of patients treated with immunotherapy ultimately respond to the treatment. And some types of cancer — like breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancers — typically don’t respond at all.
Physician scientist Dr. Wen Jiang hopes to engage the immune system using nanomaterials to combat immune-therapy–resistant cancers. He plans to start with some of the most intractable, including treatment-resistant and metastatic breast cancers.
Dr. Jiang was recruited in 2018 from The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where he was a resident in radiation oncology, to The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. A First-Time Tenure-Track Award from CPRIT enabled this promising young researcher to remain in Texas.
The immune system engages specialized cells to clean up and dispose of dead tissue. These cells, called phagocytes, roam the body and, once they find a dead cell, engulf and eliminate it. Normal tissues are able to hide under a natural invisibility cloak to evade phagocytes, but unfortunately, cancer cells also hijack this mechanism to conceal themselves.
Cancer cells may be invisible to phagocytes, but they have their own unique signatures that can be exploited. Dr. Jiang is developing nanomaterials that seek out cancer cells using this cellular signature. The nanomaterials attach themselves to a cancer cell, and can then snag a roaming phagocyte, which will engulf and dispose of the cancer cell.
“I think of these nanomaterials as a Lego set,” he says. “By using a nanoconstruct we can have different components made ready for different cancers, and we can plug-and-play different components to target a specific disease or cancer.”
So far, Dr. Jiang has seen promising results in mice with HER2-expressing breast cancer. He hopes to be able to use the same concept to target other tumors like brain and prostate.
“Any tumors that have a kind of unique signature, we can use that to our advantage,” he says. Currently the nanomaterials are made of a kind of polymer, but he says he’s working with a company to make materials out of proteins, which eventually would be naturally degraded.
As a radiation oncologist, Dr. Jiang is also exploring using radiation to enhance the immune system. “Radiation kills cancer cells by damaging their DNA, but it also does more than that,” he says. “It causes changes and inflammation that boost immune response, an aspect that has been overlooked until recently.”
Dr. Jiang began his career as an engineer, but became interested in going to medical school because he saw a disconnection between academic research and clinical medicine. “I always wanted to be an oncologist,” he says, “and four years in medical school opened my eyes in terms of what patients really need, and helped me to start approaching research problems from a different perspective.”
He credits CPRIT for bringing world-leading cancer researchers to the state, including Nobel laureate and immunotherapy pioneer James Allison. “It’s no accident that Texas is one of the leading places for cancer immunotherapy,” he says. “It really put the state on the map.”
Dr. Jiang received his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from Carleton University in Toronto, and his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the University of Toronto. He was a postdoctoral fellow in nanotechnology at Harvard University before pursuing his medical education at Stanford University, where he was awarded his M.D. in 2013. He came to MD Anderson as a resident in 2014, after a one-year internship at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, Calif. He holds two patents for his work.
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