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Joyce F. Liu, MD, MPH
Joyce F. Liu, MD, MPH
Posted: Tuesday, January 21, 2025
A team at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, led by Girija Goyal, PhD, was selected by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) as an awardee of its Spirit of Women’s Health effort to develop “iNodes” to treat ovarian cancer. According to Dr. Goyal and colleagues, this novel treatment paradigm, which consists of implantable lymphoid organs containing patients’ immune cells, represents an entirely new type of personalized immunotherapy for ovarian cancer.
“We envision that patients with ovarian cancer could be asked to bank their immune cells ahead of surgeries through simple procedures that are available at most medical centers. iNodes can be created in a short time and injected at tumor sites where they develop into lymphoid organs in a matter of days or a few weeks, instead of the years that natural lymphoid organs can take to develop,” said Dr. Goyal in a Wyss Institute press release.
The therapy was created based on previous research demonstrating that the immune structures could activate lymphocytes and eliminate immunologically active human lung cancer cells in laboratory assays. Additionally, the minority of patients who survived ovarian cancer often developed “lymphoid organs” in their tumors. These new “lymphoid organs” reprogram the immune system to attack the tumor and retain a long-term immune memory of the tumor in case of its recurrence.
The team plans to test the therapy’s ability to shrink tumor masses in mice carrying human ovarian tumors and combine it with other types of immunotherapy, including immune checkpoint therapies, which might prove to be synergistic with iNodes to enhance their effects.
Dr. Goyal is joined on the iNodes team by postdoctoral fellow Sudip Paudel, PhD; research technician Abdul Isaacs; the Wyss Institute’s Business Director– Healthcare Gretchen Fougere, PhD; and Wyss Institute’s Director of Business Development–Partnerships Samuel Inverso, PhD.
