Haiying Cheng, M.D, Ph.D.

Great advances have been made recently in treating lung cancer with immunotherapy, especially the treatment blocking the immune checkpoint PD-1/PD-L1, which can treat cancer by working with patients’ own immune system. However, not all patients respond to this new treatment. The five-year survival rates in patients with metastatic disease remains only 5.5%. We suspect that there are other immune checkpoints that prevent the immune system from working. We plan to study several newly found immune checkpoints (including HHLA2, B7x and B7-H3), to see if these are the culprits that help lung cancer hide from the immune system, and determine how they are related to lung cancer and their influence on current immunotherapy. We will also study how these new immune checkpoints are regulated. Our study can open a promising avenue for the discovery of novel immune treatment strategies for patients with advanced lung cancer.

Update: In the current study, we have successfully characterized the expression and regulatory mechanisms of PD-L1 and these new immune checkpoints in a particular subtype of lung cancer - pulmonary sarcomatoid carcinoma (PSC). Our study could serve as a foundation for novel combination therapies of molecularly targeted agents and immunotherapeutics.