According to the US Cancer Statistics Incidence and Mortality Web-based Report in 2014, in the US alone someone died of cancer every minute. According to Cancer Research UK one in two of us will be diagnosed with cancer during our lifetimes. One out of four of these people will die because of this disease.
Even if annual cancer mortality has slightly decreased, this is mainly related to an improvement in early diagnosis. Results of therapy are still unsatisfactory. Firstly, only up to 2% of the administered drug reaches the solid tumor, while the rest goes to other tissues causing side effects. That poor drug distribution in tumor tissue is related to characteristics of its microenvironments that limit drug penetration, thereby exposing the tumor to lower than efficacious concentrations of drugs.
Therefore, our main research interest is in development of novel approaches to treat solid tumors: cell-based therapies, solid tumor immunotherapies, improved drug delivery (targeted delivery), delivery to hypoxic and unreachable sites of the tumor, develop novel combinations of immunotherapies or harness the immune system for the elimination of cancer.
Recently, we focused on investigation of TRAIN (TRAnsfer of Iron-binding proteiN) mechanism, that has been discovered by our team together with Dr. Tomasz Rygiel from Cellis Ltd. and Prof. Alberto Boffi from Sapienza University of Rome (Italy). This discovery is very important for the scientific society working on homeostasis and immune-oncology, as well as interactions within tumor microenvironment.
On the other hand, TRAIN discovery gives possibility to “smuggle” anticancer drugs to the tumor. This method allows us to create a “Trojan horse” that we may use to deliver drugs directly to the tumor site to kill cancer cells and activate immune system changing immunologically “cold” tumors into “hot”.
Our aim is to translate our research discovery into the real therapy and to improve human life.
Currently we are conducting two scientific projects: ERC Proof of Concept and SONATA grant from the National Research Centre and one commercial project together with a start-up company Cellis Ltd. and InnoTech4Life.