Mostafa Yazdi
Missouri University of Science and Technology, MO·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive form of breast cancer with a poor outlook. Patients urgently need treatments beyond standard chemotherapy.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
Materials Science
- Topics
triple-negative breast cancer
cancer vaccine
nanovaccine
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Evaluate the anti-tumor activity of the Tumor-derived Cell-membrane Coated NanoVaccine (TCC-NV), adjuvant-loaded particles wrapped in tumor cell membranes, in immune-competent mouse models of triple-negative breast cancer.
- Test whether radiation therapy increases the display of neoepitopes, new tumor protein fragments that T cells can recognize, to strengthen TCC-NV responses in mouse TNBC tumors.
- Determine whether immune checkpoint inhibitors, drugs that remove brakes on T cells, act together with TCC-NV and radiation to eliminate TNBC tumors in mouse models.
More about the research
One promising approach is a personalized cancer vaccine built from neoantigens, the mutated proteins unique to a patient's tumor. These vaccines train T cells, the immune system's targeted killers, to attack the cancer. But making them is slow and costly, because each patient's neoantigens must be predicted, ranked and checked. TNBC also carries relatively few mutations, so it offers fewer targets.
Why it matters
Women with triple-negative breast cancer have few effective options beyond chemotherapy. A personalized nanovaccine that is quick and cheap to make could offer an "on-demand" immunotherapy matched to each patient's tumor. It could attack both primary tumors and small metastases and might help prevent recurrence. Its simple production is intended to ease eventual clinical testing.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Rebecca Aft
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Medicine & Clinical Research
Evaluate whether an 8-gene bone marrow test for disseminated tumor cells predicts distant metastasis in TNBC patients treated with carboplatin, paclitaxel and nivolumab, with or without cabiralizumab, in a phase II trial.
Theresa Guo
University of California-San Diego, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Predict and rank splice-variant-derived peptides, short protein fragments made only by tumors with abnormal RNA splicing, from head and neck squamous cell carcinoma using an established computational pipeline.
Yaguang Xi
University of Georgia, GA·Pharmacology
Determine how the oncogenic microRNA miR-10b and its target gene NR4A3 contribute to the experimental compound LG007's activity against triple-negative breast cancer.
The school
Missouri University of Science and Technology: 7 labs on PI Pages, $70M a year on research, 96 research doctorates a year.
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