UPenn, Wistar Institute to collaborate on $12 million SPORE grant

The Wistar Institute has announced that Meenhard Herlyn, DVM, DSc, will be the principal investigator on a $12.1 million Special Program of Research Excellence grant from the National Cancer Institute.

Under the grant, Wistar and the University of Pennsylvania will collaborate to develop new melanoma therapies.

Meenhard Herlyn

Lynn Schuchter

The goal of the Special Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant is to translate fundamental laboratory discoveries into new therapeutics that will benefit patients with melanoma and other skin cancers, according to a Wistar press release.

Wistar is the first basic research National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center to be awarded a SPORE grant.

The grant will fund four melanoma research projects:

Targeted Combination Therapy for Melanoma
- Investigators: Herlyn and Lynn Schuchter, MD (Penn).
- This study will look at the effects of combining vemurafenib, a drug that targets mutant BRAF proteins, and PX-866, a drug that targets the protein PI3K. Both mutant BRAF and PI3K are known causes behind melanoma tumors.
Autophagy Modulation for Melanoma Therapy
- Investigators: Ravit Amaravadi, MD, (Penn) and David Speicher, PhD (Wistar).
- This project will examine the theory that inhibiting autophagy will have a synergistic effect when used with BRAF inhibitors.
Association of Inherited Variation in Immune Mediated Adverse Events and Response to Ipilimumab
- Investigators: Katherine Nathanson, MD, (Penn) and Peter Kanetsky, PhD (H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute).
- This project is aimed at determining genetic markers that predict which patients will do poorly when treated with ipilimumab.
Engineered T-Cell Therapy for Melanoma
- Investigators: Robert Vonderheide, MD, DPhil, and Carl June, MD (Penn).
- This project will explore adoptive cellular therapy use, or the modification of a patient’s own T cells to target metastatic melanoma cells.

The SPORE grant will also support three “cores” to further the SPORE team’s research efforts: an administrative core to maximize the Wistar — Penn collaboration, a biospecimen and pathology core to provide SPORE researchers with high-quality melanoma tumor samples, and a biostatistics core to help analyze and understand research results of the experiments and clinical studies, according to the release.