Claudia Gravekamp
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Brain tumors are among the hardest cancers to treat, partly because the blood brain barrier, the tight lining of brain blood vessels, keeps most drugs and immune cells out of the brain. Glioblastoma multiforme is especially aggressive and resistant to treatment.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
Pharmacology
- Topics
glioblastoma
brain cancer
blood brain barrier
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2028
What they work on
- Characterize engineered Listeria carrying tetanus toxoid in brain tumors, measuring where the bacteria distribute throughout the body of live mice and testing their ability to infect and kill glioblastoma cells in culture.
- Test whether Listeria-tetanus toxoid combined with the chemotherapy drug gemcitabine reduces tumor burden and extends survival in mice bearing Gl261 and SB28 glioblastomas.
- Assess safety of Listeria treatment in mice, including listeriosis, liver impairment, and how long the bacteria persist in the brain without causing chronic infection, as regulators require.
- Determine whether delivering tetanus toxoid into tumor cells recruits pre-existing tetanus-specific memory T cells to attack the tumor, using the toxoid as a stand-in recall and neoantigen.
More about the research
This project tests a way to make a brain tumor look like something the immune system already knows how to attack, by delivering a familiar vaccine protein directly into tumor cells.
Why it matters
Glioblastoma patients have few effective options, in part because treatments cannot reach tumors past the blood brain barrier. Redirecting the tetanus-specific memory T cells most people already carry against brain tumor cells could become a new immunotherapy; this work generates the efficacy, survival, and safety data in mouse glioblastoma models needed to judge whether the strategy should move toward human application.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Irina Balyasnikova
Northwestern University, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Test how overexpression of SEC61G, part of the endoplasmic reticulum channel that threads new proteins into the secretory pathway, works with the growth-signaling MAPK pathway to protect glioma cells from killing by cytotoxic T cells.
Yvonne Yu-Hsuan Chen
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Test whether bispecific IL-13Rα2/TGF-β CAR-T cells, which target a tumor marker and turn the suppressive signal TGF-β into a stimulant, clear glioblastoma and trigger immunity against tumor cells lacking the marker, in mouse models of mixed tumors.
David Akhavan
University of Kansas, KS·Biomedical Engineering
Develop nanocarriers, tiny drug-carrying particles, that can be loaded into CAR T cells, which are engineered tumor-targeting immune cells, to create a platform for delivering drugs into glioblastoma.
The school
Albert Einstein College of Medicine: 21 labs on PI Pages, $361M a year on research, 36 research doctorates a year.
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