Life Sciences Commons^™

Understanding Immunometabolic And Suppressive Factors That Impact Cancer Development, Rebecca Swearingen Hesterberg

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The immune system is responsible for surveillance against pathogens and malignancies and adoptive transfer of antigen-specific T is a powerful new cancer treatment option. There is a clinical need to understand more about the normal regulatory processes that prevent immunosurveillance and how to manipulate this for clinical benefit. This project aims to understand T cells from three different angles. First, the biological role of the negative regulator cereblon (CRBN) was investigated in CD8+ T cells and my studies showed that higher levels of specific derivatives downstream of the amino acid glutamine may be beneficial to T cells in the immune …

Integrated Molecular Characterization Of Lung Adenocarcinoma With Implications For Immunotherapy, Nicholas T. Gimbrone

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation covers a variety of the genetic and molecular abnormalities of lung adenocarcinoma with an emphasis on STK11 loss and its implications on immunotherapy response. Given that lung cancer is the leading cancer killer, novel therapies are in great demand. In particular, immunotherapy has shown some of the most promise in the last decade but remains limited due to nearly 80% of patients not significantly responding. This dissertation aims to molecularly characterize lung adenocarcinoma while attempting to explain the reason why patients with STK11 loss do not respond to immunotherapy.

In the first chapter we discuss the relationship between …