Ronald Caplan, founder and president of PMC Property Group, Inc., and his wife Ellen have donated $10 million to the NCI-designated Wistar Cancer Center in Philadelphia, now renamed the Ellen and Ronald Caplan Cancer Center of The Wistar Institute.
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.
