Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Development Of A Pd-L1 Pet Imaging Biomarker, Caleb Jack Bridgwater

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Immunotherapy strategies are very promising treatments for cancer patients. Specifically, Immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy focusing on the PD-1/PD-L1 pathway shows long-lasting positive results in many cancer patients. Unfortunately, not all the patients can benefit from this highly effective treatment. Hence, there is a great need for predictive biomarkers. Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining has been used as a way of predicting patient response, yet shows many problems. For example, IHC utilizes an invasive biopsy and sample fixing, which creates an incomplete and delayed picture of the patient’s biochemistry and the tumor microenvironment, consequently ignoring metastases.

The purpose of this study is to …

Targeting Cancer Stem Cells In Recurrent Lung Cancer, Karen T. Udoh

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality in the world. Five-year survivability still remains dismal due to drug resistance. The development of drug resistance with cisplatin or platinum/taxane combination chemotherapies has led patients to suffer from recurrent lung cancer. These chemotherapy treatments target cancer cells but leave behind cancer stem cells. Cancer stem cells (CSCs) are stem-like tumor cells that have the potential to differentiate, self-renew, and proliferate. This allows the cancer to relapse even after initial elimination of the tumor. We hypothesize that Verrucarin J will inhibit cell proliferation in lung cancer cells and CSCs by inducing …