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The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (UTSW) has awarded eight researchers with prestigious SPORE subawards to advance the field of kidney cancer research. This competitive program is part of the larger Specialized Programs of Research Excellence (SPORE) grant and is designed to support innovative studies through two key initiatives: the Career Enhancement Program (CEP) and the Developmental Research Program (DRP). The CEP aims to bolster junior faculty and seasoned investigators transitioning into kidney cancer research, while the DRP funds high-risk, high-reward projects with significant translational potential. The selected researchers will explore a range of critical areas including cellular signaling pathways, epigenetics, tumor-stroma interactions, and more, with the goal of advancing understanding and treatment of kidney cancer.

Below are the eight awardees along with an overview of their research.

DRP Awardees:

     “Our research focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms that govern metabolism in cancer and related disorders. This work seeks to uncover how dietary nucleotides fuel kidney cancer growth. Our goal is to identify novel approaches to manipulate nucleotide availability to impede cancer progression.”

“The proposed research explores a novel mechanism by which Hippo signaling regulates ccRCC tumor growth and investigates the potential for targeting the Hippo pathway for ccRCC treatment.”

“The project’s goal is to test the hypothesis that differential enhancer landscapes and 3D genome organization are major determinants of clinical outcomes in PBRM1-deficient and BAP1-deficient ccRCC.”

“In our proposal we will develop a kidney-cancer-specific multiplexed imaging pipeline (based on CODEX) to identify different cell types in patient tissue. This will serve as a valuable resource for the kidney cancer community to explore how the spatial organization of the microenvironment impacts tumor biology.”

“Based on research developed at UTSW, HIF2 inhibitors have been recently approved by the FDA as a new drug class for the treatment of HIF2-driven kidney cancers. Since these HIF2 inhibitors have sub-optimal efficacy in certain clinical contexts, we propose to develop proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs) as targeted degraders of HIF2 to address the unmet need for superior HIF2-targeted drugs.”

“This study aims to generate next-generation IL-2-based immunocytokines as a new paradigm for kidney cancer treatment. We will utilize protein engineering to enhance IL-2-mediated antitumor efficacy in the acidic immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment of Renal Cell Carcinoma, and investigate their activity and toxicity in the autologous humanized mouse models of RCC, as well as dissect resistance mechanisms to immunotherapy.”

CEP Awardees:

“The Jewell Lab studies how organisms detect environmental nutrient changes and adjust anabolic and catabolic processes to regulate cell growth, metabolism, and autophagy.”