Project description:Increasing success is being achieved in the treatment of malignancies with stromal-targeted therapies, predominantly in anti-angiogenesis and immunotherapy, predominantly checkpoint inhibitors. Despite 15 years of clinical trials with anti-VEGF pathway inhibitors for cancer, we still find ourselves lacking reliable predictive biomarkers to select patients for anti-angiogenesis therapy. For the more recent immunotherapy agents, there are many approaches for patient selection under investigation. Notably, the predictive power of an Ad-VEGF-A164 mouse model to drive a stromal response with similarities to a wound healing response shows relevance for human cancer and was used to generate stromal signatures. We have developed gene signatures for 3 stromal states and leveraged the data from multiple large cohort bioinformatics studies of gastric cancer (TCGA, ACRG) to further understand how these relate to the dominant patient phenotypes identified by previous bioinformatics efforts. We have also designed multiplexed IHC assays that robustly represent the vascular and immune diversity in gastric cancer. Finally, we have used this methodology to arrive at a hypothesis of how angiogenesis and immunotherapy may fit into the experimental approaches for gastric cancer treatments. The Ad-VEGF-A164 flank model was performed as described in Flank tissue from harvest day 0, day 5, day 20, and day 60 was taken for RNA generation. Samples for messenger RNA (mRNA) profiling studies were processed by Asuragen, Inc. (Austin, TX, USA) using GeneChip® Mouse Genome 430 2.0 Array (Affymetrix, Santa Clara, CA) according to the company's standard operating procedures as described previously in detail [45]. A summary of the image signal data, detection calls and gene annotations for every gene interrogated on the arrays was generated using the Affymetrix Statistical Algorithm MAS 5.0 (GCOS v1.3) algorithm (scaling factor = 1500).
Project description:Increasing success is being achieved in the treatment of malignancies with stromal-targeted therapies, predominantly in anti-angiogenesis and immunotherapy, predominantly checkpoint inhibitors. Despite 15 years of clinical trials with anti-VEGF pathway inhibitors for cancer, we still find ourselves lacking reliable predictive biomarkers to select patients for anti-angiogenesis therapy. For the more recent immunotherapy agents, there are many approaches for patient selection under investigation. Notably, the predictive power of an Ad-VEGF-A164 mouse model to drive a stromal response with similarities to a wound healing response shows relevance for human cancer and was used to generate stromal signatures. We have developed gene signatures for 3 stromal states and leveraged the data from multiple large cohort bioinformatics studies of gastric cancer (TCGA, ACRG) to further understand how these relate to the dominant patient phenotypes identified by previous bioinformatics efforts. We have also designed multiplexed IHC assays that robustly represent the vascular and immune diversity in gastric cancer. Finally, we have used this methodology to arrive at a hypothesis of how angiogenesis and immunotherapy may fit into the experimental approaches for gastric cancer treatments. The Ad-VEGF-A164 angiogenesis model was performed as previously described. Animals were treated with various anti-VEGF Receptor antibodies via intraperitoneal injection at the doses (DC101 20 mpk or G6 10 mpk) and time points (day 0, day 5, day 20, day 60) to target all of the different populations of tumor-surrogate blood vessels, as they each develop at different time points. At least 5 animals, equally matched, were used per group. At the end of the experiment, angiogenic sites in flanks were photographed and tissues were taken for histology and RNA preparation.
Project description:Increasing success is being achieved in the treatment of malignancies with stromal-targeted therapies, predominantly in anti-angiogenesis and immunotherapy, predominantly checkpoint inhibitors. Despite 15 years of clinical trials with anti-VEGF pathway inhibitors for cancer, we still find ourselves lacking reliable predictive biomarkers to select patients for anti-angiogenesis therapy. For the more recent immunotherapy agents, there are many approaches for patient selection under investigation. Notably, the predictive power of an Ad-VEGF-A164 mouse model to drive a stromal response with similarities to a wound healing response shows relevance for human cancer and was used to generate stromal signatures. We have developed gene signatures for 3 stromal states and leveraged the data from multiple large cohort bioinformatics studies of gastric cancer (TCGA, ACRG) to further understand how these relate to the dominant patient phenotypes identified by previous bioinformatics efforts. We have also designed multiplexed IHC assays that robustly represent the vascular and immune diversity in gastric cancer. Finally, we have used this methodology to arrive at a hypothesis of how angiogenesis and immunotherapy may fit into the experimental approaches for gastric cancer treatments.
Project description:Increasing success is being achieved in the treatment of malignancies with stromal-targeted therapies, predominantly in anti-angiogenesis and immunotherapy, predominantly checkpoint inhibitors. Despite 15 years of clinical trials with anti-VEGF pathway inhibitors for cancer, we still find ourselves lacking reliable predictive biomarkers to select patients for anti-angiogenesis therapy. For the more recent immunotherapy agents, there are many approaches for patient selection under investigation. Notably, the predictive power of an Ad-VEGF-A164 mouse model to drive a stromal response with similarities to a wound healing response shows relevance for human cancer and was used to generate stromal signatures. We have developed gene signatures for 3 stromal states and leveraged the data from multiple large cohort bioinformatics studies of gastric cancer (TCGA, ACRG) to further understand how these relate to the dominant patient phenotypes identified by previous bioinformatics efforts. We have also designed multiplexed IHC assays that robustly represent the vascular and immune diversity in gastric cancer. Finally, we have used this methodology to arrive at a hypothesis of how angiogenesis and immunotherapy may fit into the experimental approaches for gastric cancer treatments.
Project description:Gastric cancer is a leading cause of death from cancer globally. Gastric cancer is classified into intestinal, diffuse and indeterminate subtypes based on histology according to the Laurén classification. The intestinal and diffuse subtypes, although different in histology, demographics and outcomes, are still treated in the same fashion. This study was designed to discover proteomic signatures of diffuse and intestinal subtypes. Mass spectrometry-based proteomics using tandem mass tags (TMT)-based multiplexed analysis was used to identify proteins in tumor tissues from patients with diffuse or intestinal gastric cancer with adjacent normal tissue control. A total of 7,804 or 5,166 proteins were identified from intestinal or diffuse subtype, respectively. This quantitative mass spectrometric analysis defined a proteomic signature of differential expression across the two subtypes, which included gremlin1 (GREM1), bcl-2-associated athanogene 2 (BAG2), olfactomedin 4 (OLFM4), thyroid hormone receptor interacting protein 6 (TRIP6) and melanoma-associated antigen 9 (MAGE-A9) proteins. Although GREM1, BAG2, OLFM4, TRIP6 and MAGE-A9 have all been previously implicated in tumor progression and metastasis, they have not been linked to intestinal or diffuse subtypes of gastric cancer. Using immunohistochemical labelling of a tissue microarray comprising of 132 cases of gastric cancer, we validated the proteomic signature obtained by mass spectrometry in the discovery cohort. Our findings should help investigate the pathogenesis of these gastric cancer subtypes and potentially lead to strategies for early diagnosis and treatment.