NIH R01 · 2025
Mining the microbiome for immunomodulatory microproteins
PROJECT ABSTRACT Cancer immunotherapy, when effective, is lifesaving. Unfortunately, 15-50% of individuals will not respond to therapy; therefore, efforts to ‘flip the switch’ and turn these ‘non-responders’ into ‘responders’ are critical and urgent. Encouragingly, phenomenological studies in humans and preclinical studies in mice have demonstrated that the gut microbiome is associated with cancer immunotherapy response. However, the exact mechanisms that drive microbiome-based changes in immunotherapy response are not known. This project will elucidate how microbial microproteins modulate macrophage function, a critical coordinator of tumor immune response. The central hypothesis of this…
From the public funding record at NIH RePORTER. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.