American Cancer Society Institutional Research Grants at SCI

2024

Zinaida Good, PhD, an instructor at the Stanford Institutes of Medicine, was awarded a $50,000 American Cancer Society-Stanford Cancer Institute (ACS-SCI) IRG Pilot Grant for her project entitled “Mitigating CAR T cell immunosuppression in the tumor microenvironment.” Good’s research has spanned multiple fields, from cell biological studies of T cells to animal models of cancer relapse and computational approaches to immune cell function. Her goal is to launch an independent research career to advance cellular immunotherapies for cancer patients.

In chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy, a patient’s T cells (specialized cells of the immune system) are modified so that they attack cancer cells. Good’s project aims to improve the effectiveness of CAR T cell therapy for patients with large B cell lymphoma (LBCL), a type of blood cancer. Although some LBCL patients respond to the available CAR T immunotherapy, in more than half of LBCL patients, the cancer continues to progress. With the ACS-SCI IRG award, Good will use a systems-biology approach to determine how cells in the cancer’s environment may prevent CAR T therapy from working. She will focus primarily on other immune cells that may suppress the function of CAR T cells and investigate how this suppression may be prevented. This project will identify strategies to improve patient outcomes, potentially benefitting not only patients with LBCL but also those with other types of cancer.