The Wistar Institute’s president and CEO, Dario C. Altieri, and his team have demonstrated the role of Parkin—a protein implicated in Parkinson’s disease—in the body’s innate immune response to cancer. Parkin is not expressed in several cancers. Altieri and his team engineered cancer cells to re-express Parkin and found that Parkin contributes to the production of interferons, which activate and attract T cells to fight the tumor. The lab’s findings were published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Nan ZhangNoam AuslanderNan Zhang and Noam Auslander, the Wistar Institute assistant professors, have both received independent funding totaling $1.2 million over the next three years for cancer research projects from the V Foundation for Cancer Research. The grants are awarded to cancer researchers deemed “V Scholars” and allow Zhang and Auslander to pursue separate projects aimed at new strategies to improve the effectiveness of certain cancer therapies.
