Zamarin Lab
Principal Investigator: Dmitriy Zamarin
Institution: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (New York, NY)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Epithelial ovarian cancer (EOC) remains the most lethal gynecologic malignancy. Development of immune therapies in EOC has been challenging, and clinical trials of immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) and bispecific T cell engagers (BiTEs) have been met with only limited success. The immunosuppressive TME and poor T cell priming in EOC result in lack/exclusion of T cell effectors necessary for ICB or BiTE efficacy. We have demonstrated that engineered oncolytic viruses such as Newcastle Disease Virus (NDV) expressing IL-12 can promote priming of tumor-specific T cell responses and result in a large number of activated tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), however, we find that a large proportion of these TILs is dominated by anti-viral T cells. The central premise of our proposal aims to transform the dominant antiviral response from a liability into a therapeutic asset targeting both EOC cells and immunosuppressive TME. We hypothesize that T cell response generated by NDV infection represents an abundant and therapeutically tractable effector population that can be redirected with BiTEs to target cancer cells and other immunosuppressive cell populations in th…
Active NIH Awards
- 1R01CA317668-01: Reprogramming Virus-Primed Immunity for Targeted Immunotherapy of Ovarian Cancer (2026)
- 5R01CA269382-05: POTENTIATION OF ANTI-TUMOR IMMUNITY BY ONCOLYTIC VIRUS IN SITU VACCINATION (2026)
- 5R01CA276087-04: Immunogenomic predictors of outcomes in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer treated with immunotherapy and chemoradiation (2025)
- 5R01CA269382-04: POTENTIATION OF ANTI-TUMOR IMMUNITY BY ONCOLYTIC VIRUS IN SITU VACCINATION (2025)
- 5R01CA276087-03: Immunogenomic predictors of outcomes in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer treated with immunotherapy and chemoradiation (2024)
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