Professor
University of Pennsylvannia
Dr. Tchou’s research is focused on developing combination treatment strategies to improve the effectiveness of immunotherapy such as chimeric antigen receptor or CAR T cell therapy A growing body of evidence shows that radiotherapy can stimulate immune response and may be synergistic when used with checkpoint blockades. Dr. Tchou has assembled a multidisciplinary team of clinicians and translational research scientists to evaluate this combination therapy. The availability of tumor tissue pre- and post- treatment will provide a rare opportunity to interrogate the effects of this novel approach on tumor tissues and peripheral blood. This proposed trial serves as an experimental platform to evaluate the role of radiotherapy in enhancing the immune response in tumors with low immunogenicity. Dr. Tchou and her team are hopeful that this study may help identify biomarkers associated with the “switch” in tumors, changing from immunologically “cold” to “hot.” The long-term goal is to demonstrate the utility of this approach as a versatile “in vivo” drug screening assay to evaluate response to novel therapy.