The Wistar Institute, the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center, and the Baruch S. Blumberg Institute formed a collaboration to accelerate the advancement of “bench to bedside” biomedical research discoveries in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware by collectively supporting the seeding, launching, and maturation of life science startups.
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.
