Binita Chakraborty, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology, won the Robert and Barbara Bell Basic Science Cancer Research Award for the most innovative basic science research project at the 10th annual Duke Cancer Institute Scientific Retreat held on December 12, 2024. The award included a $5,000 cash prize.
Chakraborty, a member of the Donald McDonnell lab, presented research suggesting that using clinically available endocrine therapies may help make radiation more effective against cancer.
This project, in collaboration with researchers in the Department of Neurosurgery, Department of Surgery, and Department of Radiation Oncology at Duke, as well as the Department of Genetics at UNC-Chapel Hill, revealed details about how estrogens promote immune suppression after radiation.
“Radiation therapy is widely used as a cancer treatment in various solid tumor types,” Chakraborty said. “Tissue damage following radiation therapy is often repaired by suppressive immune cells that simultaneously limit the efficacy of radiation.”
This team had previously found that estrogen helps tumors resist the immune system by promoting a particular type of estrogen signaling in immune-system cells. These cells, called tumor-associated macrophages, help cancer cells resist treatment and help promote tumor growth.
These macrophages can promote tumor growth through a process called efferocytosis — removing cancer cells that are undergoing programmed cell death (apoptosis).
In their new study, working in both cell lines and in mice, the researchers revealed details about how estrogens promote this type of immune suppression. “Our work has defined a mechanism by which estrogens increase efferocytosis to establish an immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment,” Chakraborty said. The tumor microenvironment is the community of cells that surrounds the tumor and nurtures its growth.
“By using endocrine therapies, we are hoping to curb the homing of these suppressive macrophages to the irradiated tumors, which we are hoping will increase the efficacy of radiation therapy,” she said.