[Feb. 22] D5 Medical & Life Science Seminar-Dr. Fabiana Perna

February 4 2022

The "D5 Medical & Life Science Seminar" course will be offered by International Research Center for Medical Sciences (IRCMS). It will run from April 2021 to March 2022, with lectures given by scientists who are affiliated with IRCMS or in collaboration with researchers at IRCMS. The lectures will be given once a month, in English, and by leading scientists in the relevant research field. Students will be taught: 1) how normal physiological functions are maintained in the human body; 2) how these systems become abnormal under certain pathophysiologic conditions; 3) why stem cells are important in animal development and homeostasis; 4) how stem cell-based approaches can help us understand disease mechanisms and find potential cure for diseases related to stem cell malfunction (e.g., cancer, aging).

Date      : February 22, 2022 (Tuesday)

Time      : 12:00 -
              * Zoom online seminar

Speaker : Fabiana Perna, MD, PhD
                Associate Professor
                Department of Medicine,
               Division of Hematology/Oncology,
                Indiana University School of Medicine

Title        : Mapping the cell surface proteome of hematological malignancies to develop innovative immune therapies

Abstract :

     Immunotherapy is an emerging treatment for cancer based on the success of antibody-mediated checkpoint blockade and engineered T cells. While impressive progress has been made in tumor immunology and clinical application of immunomodulatory agents in solid tumors, we don't fully understand how to effectively incorporate immunotherapeutic strategies in hematologic malignancies. I previously developed a target discovery strategy to identify Chimeric Antigen Receptor targets in Acute Myeloid Leukemia (Perna F et al., Cancer Cell 2017). My lab investigates how essential genetic determinants of hematologic malignancies shape the cancer cell surfaceome, thus providing targets for promoting cancer initiation and progression and use of precision immunotherapy. We generate and mine composite high-throughput proteomic and transcriptomic data from human and mouse genetic models and utilize primary patient samples for validation in search of novel targets. Our accurate proteogenomic approach for target discovery also includes computational work as we develop our own integrated datasets for cell surface molecule annotation and inform CAR design. My lab identified novel immune targets associated with Multiple Myeloma (Di Meo F. ASH 2021) and splice variants of cells surface proteins aberrantly expressed in AML. We will review those data aimed at developing novel immunotherapies for patients with hematologic malignancies.

Selected publications: (*corresponding author)

1. Dong C, Cesarano A, Bombaci G, Reiter J, Yu C, Wang Y, Jiang Z, Abu M, Huang K, Lu X, Walker B, Liu Y* and Perna F*. Intron retention-induced neoantigen load correlates with unfavorable prognosis in multiple myeloma. Oncogene 2021. Sep 9:1-9.
2. Perna F* Safety starts with selecting the targets. Molecular Therapy 2021 Feb 3;29(2):424-425.
3. Perna F, Berman S, Soni R, Mansilla-Soto J, Eyquem J, Hamieh M, Hendrickson R, Brennan C, Sadelain M. Integrating proteomics and transcriptomics for systematic combinatorial chimeric antigen receptor therapy of AML. Cancer Cell 2017 Oct 9;32(4):506-519.e5.

Flyer: (Click for a larger image)