Sandhya Malla Awarded a Cancerfonden Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Pereira Lab researcher Sandhya Malla was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by Cancerfonden, the Swedish Cancer Society. The aim of Cancerfonden’s postdoctoral grants is to recruit successful young researchers that can significantly benefit cancer research in Sweden. Sandhya’s project was one of the awarded for a postdoctoral position with her project “Decoding The Regulatory Grammar of Transcription Factor-Mediated Immune Reprogramming”.

The inconsistent efficacy of cancer immunotherapy is due to factors such as tumor heterogeneity and the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment (TME). Capable of reshaping the TME and eliciting immune competence directly in tumors, the immune reprogramming strategy developed by the Pereira Lab reprograms tumors cells into type 1 conventional dendritic cells (cDC1s) through the overexpression of PU.1, IRF8, and BATF3 (PIB). Despite the promise behind this immunotherapy modality, reprogramming efficiency remains variable across tumors, since it can be shaped by chromatin barriers limiting the engagement of reprogramming factors and by temporal dynamics. Sandhya’s project will address these roadblocks with the following specific objectives: defining how PIB structurally engage nucleosomes and establishing the temporal requirements of PIB activity in vivo. For the latter, Sandhya will generate an inducible PIB mouse model to determine how induction regimens establish stable lineage programs and durable immune competence.

Sandhya’s project will enable us to understand the structural principles, temporal windows, and dosage thresholds of PIB activity to ultimately design synthetic reprogramming factors for efficient reprogramming across tumors. In line with the Cancerfonden’s vision of defeating cancer, this will directly contribute to widening the scope of immune reprogramming to more patients and tumor types.