UVA researcher receives $700,000 for promising research on ovarian cancer.

UVA researcher receives $700,000 for promising research on ovarian cancer.

Melanie Rutkowski, PhD's promising ovarian cancer research at the University of Virginia Comprehensive Cancer Center has received $700,000 in support from the Victoria's Secret Global Fund for Women's Cancers in partnership with Pelotonia and the AACR, the American Association for Cancer Research.

Rutkowski was selected as a Victoria's Secret Rising Innovator and will receive a research grant in partnership with Pelotonia and the AACR to support her studies on the role of microbiome – the collection of microorganisms that live inside us – in ovarian cancer and the disease's stubborn ability to resist immunotherapy. Their work sheds light on important aspects of why ovarian cancer is so difficult to treat with immunotherapies and could lead to better treatments to improve patient outcomes.

It is a great honor to be selected as one of the recipients of the Victoria’s Secret Global Fund for Women’s Cancer Rising Innovator Research Grant. Most studies focus on how tumor cells cause resistance to immunotherapy. Our lab has identified a pathway that is controlled by our immune cells when they recognize commensal bacteria. However, we do not yet fully understand why these interactions have such negative effects on the immune system.

Melanie Rutkowski, PhD, part of the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Cancer Biology, UVA School of Medicine

The microbiome and ovarian cancer

The three-year grant will support Rutkowski's research into how faulty cell signaling undermines the body's ability to detect and fight ovarian cancer. She discovered that bacteria in the gut interact with certain immune cells to suppress the body's immune response. This ultimately leads to the failure of immunotherapies that aim to boost this immune response and help the body destroy the cancer cells.

With funding from the Victoria's Secret grant, Rutkowski plans to better understand how chronic exposure to the microbiome affects immune cells and the "microenvironment" surrounding ovarian tumors. This microenvironment includes immune cells, blood vessels and other substances that together can either promote or inhibit cancer growth.

Rutkowski hopes that her work will lead to methods that combat the effects of faulty cell signaling and ultimately increase the effectiveness of the Immunotherapy improve in ovarian cancer.

“This grant will help us understand how and why these interactions cause immunotherapy failure and brings us one step closer to developing new therapeutic interventions that improve the immune system's ability to kill cancer cells in patients with ovarian cancer,” Rutkowski said. "The results in ovarian cancer are dismal, and immunotherapy has the potential to provide significant therapeutic benefit if we could figure out how to block the key pathways that drive resistance. The goal will be to use the discoveries from this grant to ultimately develop a novel immunotherapy that can revitalize the immune system and ultimately improve outcomes for ovarian cancer."

About the grant

The Victoria's Secret Fund for Women's Cancers Rising Innovator Research Grant, in partnership with Pelotonia and the AACR, supports midcareer scientists conducting innovative research in breast and gynecological cancers. The aim is to promote innovation in the understanding, prevention, early detection, diagnosis and treatment of these cancers to improve outcomes and eliminate cancer health disparities. The most recent class of grant recipients is available on the AACR website.

Finding new and better treatments for the most complex and challenging diseases is a core mission of UVA's new Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology. The institute aims to increase the speed at which discoveries from the laboratory can be translated into life-saving new treatments for patients.

UVA's commitment to improving the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy and the institution's long track record of therapeutic applications for Focused Ultrasound technology have also led UVA Health to establish the world's first Center for Focused Ultrasound Immunotherapy. The center is researching how combining immunotherapy with focused sound waves could improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy and revolutionize the treatment of many different types of cancer.

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