UCLA researcher receives NIH award

Lili Yang, PhD, a researcher at UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, received an NIH Director’s New Innovator Award of $2.3 million.

The award — designed to support unusually creative new investigators with highly innovative research ideas at an early stage of their career — recognizes Yang’s research into methods to genetically program human blood stem cells to attack cancer tumors.

Yang’s previous research focused on T cells. She is now building on that work to develop a new way to model how scientists can genetically program human blood stem cells to become invariant natural killer T cells (iNKT), which demonstrate a remarkable capacity to mount immediate and powerful responses to disease when activated.

She and her colleagues hope to provide a roadmap for future therapies designed to increase the number of iNKT cells in the blood, increasing the body's ability to fight off the diseases these cells affect, such as cancer.

“The potential for iNKT T-cell receptor-based gene therapy is very exciting because it is very different from conventional T-cell receptor-based gene therapy, which can only target specific types of tumor and a certain group of patients,” Yang said in a press release. “The kind of iNKT T-cell receptor gene therapy we are investigating could have universal application, treating many types of cancer and a large group of patients no matter what types of tumor they have. It holds tremendous promise.”