Targeting glycans to enable precision cancer immunotherapy

Sugars called glycans coat the surfaces of every cell in our bodies. In cancer, tumor-associated glycans contribute to immune suppression and resistance to current treatments. Our work aims to target glycans to enable new strategies for precision cancer immunotherapy. Our long-term goal is to use these precision immunotherapies to expand the subset of patients and cancers that can be effectively treated.

Dr. Jessica Stark is the Underwood Prescott Career Development Professor (Assistant Professor) in the departments of Biological and Chemical Engineering and an intramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Her research program seeks to understand and engineer the roles of sugars, or glycans, in the immune system, with a focus in cancer. As an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow with Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University, Dr. Stark established a new class of protein therapeutics that makes it possible to target glycans for cancer immunotherapy. This technology is in translation to the clinic via her co-founded company, Valora Therapeutics. As an NSF Graduate Research Fellow with Prof. Michael Jewett at Northwestern University, she developed cell-free technologies for protein therapeutic and vaccine production that promise to enable portable and personalized medicine. Previously, she received her B.S. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University and worked at Genentech, Inc. in process development and research and development roles. Dr. Stark’s independent work has been recognized with a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface, the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer’s Steven A. Rosenberg Scholar Award, and a V Foundation V Scholar Award.

The future of cancer care will replace traditional therapies, like chemotherapies, with precision medicines that are tailored to an individual patient’s disease. One example of precision medicine is immunotherapy, a new kind of treatment that teaches the immune system to recognize and destroy cancer. Some patients treated with immunotherapy cleared their tumors and remained in remission for decades – the closest we’ve come to a cancer cure. However, the limited efficacy and side effects of existing immunotherapies mean that most cancer patients (~80%) do not benefit from treatment. Thus, there is an urgent need for new medicines that can help immune cells more precisely identify and kill cancer cells. 

One way that immune cells interact with cancer cells is by detecting the sugars, or glycans, they display on their surfaces. This project will shed light on this biology and develop medicines that target these glycans to enable new kinds of precision immunotherapy for cancer. Our hope is that medicines targeting sugars can help extend the benefits of precision medicine and the curative potential of immunotherapy to all cancer patients.

"Innovation means taking risks – pushing the boundaries of knowledge and pursuing projects that have some likelihood of failure. But despite its inherent risk, innovation is necessary to enable the transformative advances in science and technology that will be required to address a challenge as big as cancer."