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Lili Yang receives $2.3 million award from NIH

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LILI YANG received the $2.3 million Director’s New Innovator Award from NIH for research into developing ways to genetically program blood stem cells to attack cancers. Yang is an assistant professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics at UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Her research focused on T cells and a smaller group of invariant natural killer T cells, which have a remarkable capacity to mount immediate and powerful responses to disease when activated. She and her colleagues hope to develop therapies designed to increase the number of iNKT cells in the blood.

“The potential for iNKT T cell receptor-based gene therapy is very exciting because it is very different from conventional T cell receptor-based gene therapy, which can only target specific types of tumor and a certain group of patients,” said Yang. “The kind of iNKT T cell receptor gene therapy we are investigating could have universal application, treating many types of cancer and a large group of patients no matter what types of tumor they have.”

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