On Aug. 1, 2025, the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Center (NIH/NCI) awarded a $2.89-million R01 grant to Assistant Professor Ling Cai, PhD, and her collaborator, Professor of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, G. Greg Wang, PhD. The grant will support their investigation into how an understudied epigenetic regulator plays a role in regulating immune evasion in advanced prostate cancer (PCa). This innovative study has the potential to advance treatment options for PCa.
PCa usually does not respond to immunotherapy, such as treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs). This highlights the urgent need to investigate why the disease is able to resist the body’s immune defenses. Cai and Wang’s research will explore a less-characterized epigenetic pathway that may help PCa avoid detection by the immune system. They will test whether blocking this pathway can increase tumor immunogenicity and inflame the tumor microenvironment to make the cancer more visible to immune cells, potentially improving the effectiveness of ICI-based therapy.
Grant co-investigators include Duke University School of Medicine Johnston-West Endowed Department Chair of Pathology Jiaoti Huang, MD, PhD and Professor Deyou Zheng, PhD, from Albert Einstein College of Medicine.