Authors: Sophie Daines, Carlos Moreno, Alka Gour, K Scott Weber
Mentors: Scott Weber
Insitution: Brigham Young University
In recent years, immunotherapies have shown promise as alternative cancer treatments. They aim to improve the immune system’s ability to target and kill cancer cells. The ability to evade the immune system is a distinctive characteristic of cancer that has many contributing factors, including creating nutrient scarce environments and expressing ligands that inhibit T cell function. CD6 is a coreceptor protein found in T cell membranes that is being investigated for its role in T cell activation and regulation. Coreceptors are needed to regulate T cell activation, and several of them inhibit T cell activity to prevent autoreactivity, including CD6. However, in the context of cancer, they suppress the anti-tumor functions of T cells. We hypothesize that removing CD6 from T cell membranes will improve their ability to function in the tumor microenvironment. Tumor cells consume greater amounts of nutrients to sustain their rapid growth, depleting the environment of glucose, amino acids, and other important nutrients which allows them to outcompete other cells. Recent research has shown that removing CD5, a similar receptor to CD6, increases metabolic rates. It is expected that removing CD6 will produce similar results, allowing the cells to be more efficient at metabolizing and therefor more competitive to the tumor cells. Using CD6 knockout mouse spleens we will measure the metabolism, proliferation, and cytokine production of CD6 negative T cells to determine their efficiency against tumor cells.