Block Lectureship Junior Faculty Award recipient eager for mentorship with pioneering immunotherapy scientist
Nandini Acharya, PhD, believes her early-career work in cancer immunotherapy will get a big boost from a Nobel laureate who’s world-renowned in this discipline.
As the 2023 recipient of the Block Lectureship Junior Faculty Award, Dr. Acharya, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at Ohio State, will embark on a two-year mentorship with James Allison, PhD, a co-winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine and chair of the Department of Immunology at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Dr. Allison also is the 25th recipient of the Herbert and Maxine Block Memorial Lectureship Award for Distinguished Achievement in Cancer, a $50,000 award that the OSUCCC – James gives to an esteemed cancer researcher who then comes to Ohio State to accept the honor, lecture on his or her work, and select a junior faculty member to mentor. Dr. Allison chose Dr. Acharya from among four talented candidates.
“I feel extremely humbled and honored to receive this award,” says Dr. Acharya, who is in the Translational Therapeutics Program and the Pelotonia Institute for Immuno-Oncology at the OSUCCC – James. “It’s a great privilege for a junior faculty member in immuno-oncology to be mentored by the pioneer in the field. I’m excited about sharing my thoughts and ideas and getting advice from Dr. Allison as I start my journey of discovering mechanisms that can affect the efficacy of immunotherapy in cancer.”
She is certain she will benefit from her mentor’s vast knowledge of immunotherapy, which harnesses the body’s immune system to more effectively combat cancer and other illnesses.
“Dr. Allison is the global face of cancer immunotherapy – he discovered that blocking a checkpoint molecule called CTLA4 would essentially ‘release the breaks’ and reinvigorate the immune system to fight cancer,” Dr. Acharya says, noting that his work led to the 2011 FDA approval of ipilimumab (an anti-CTLA4 agent) for treating metastatic melanoma – the first approval of an immune checkpoint-targeting immunotherapy. “This led to the opening of an entirely new field of treatment for cancer and changed the landscape of cancer treatment forever. The discoveries that Dr. Allison and his team have made are revolutionary and have changed the lives of patients and their families worldwide.”
Dr. Acharya thinks her lab team’s research focus will blend well with Dr. Allison’s work in immunotherapy.
“The major focus of our laboratory is deciphering the molecular determinants of cross-talk between cellular components of the tumor microenvironment that can affect antitumor immunity in glioblastoma, the most prevalent type of primary malignant brain tumor in adults,” she explains. “Despite surgical resection and chemo-radiation, the prognosis for these patients remains poor, suggesting a dire need for novel therapies.”
Although immune checkpoint blockade therapy – which prevents checkpoint proteins in the immune system from binding with their partner proteins and enables T cells to kill cancer cells – has shown remarkable outcomes in patients with some types of cancer, Dr. Acharya says glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) remains highly resistant to this immunotherapy, and her team is trying to learn why.
She says the GBM tumor microenvironment contains an immune-suppressive cellular network that thwarts an effective antitumor response, so gaining a deeper understanding of how that works “is critical for delineating and reprogramming these immune-suppressive circuits.”
Her Junior Faculty Award will provide her with $25,000 to further her research. “We will apply the money to perform experiments that will lead to a clearer understanding of the gene programs that are regulated by neuropeptides in immune cells and uncover how the neurons affect antitumor immunity in the context of GBM.”
Even more valuable, she believes, will be the guidance she’ll receive from Dr. Allison and his colleagues. “Learning that I had received this award was great news,” she says. “I’m super excited to get started.”