By Jorge Mercado Wednesday, October 9th, 2024

UC Santa Barbara Professor Denise Montell was awarded a Pioneer Award by the National Institutes of Health which comes with $5.5 million of funding over the next five years to further develop her work on immunotherapy, the treatment of disease by activating or suppressing the immune system.

She said in a press release that she plans to use the funds to test a new treatment her group is developing for numerous types of cancer and other diseases, such as antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Announced Oct. 8, this is the second time Montell has successfully competed for the award, earning her first in 2014. 

“It is truly incredible that, for the second time in a decade, Professor Montell has received this prestigious award, which highlights her groundbreaking research and her unwavering dedication to advancing biomedical science,” UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang said in a press release..

“Denise’s pioneering work not only enhances our understanding of fundamental biological processes but opens new avenues for discovery that will benefit countless lives.”

The award is part of the NIH’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program.

“The HRHR program champions exceptionally bold and innovative science that pushes the boundaries of biomedical and behavioral research,” NIH Deputy Director for Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives Tara Schwetz said in a press release. 

“The groundbreaking science pursued by these researchers is poised to have a broad impact on human health.”

Montell began her research career by investigating the behavior of a small group of cells in the ovary of a fruit fly, noting that she saw cells migrate and she wanted to know how they do it.

Working with a group of graduate students, one student, Anne Marie Murphy, discovered that a particular protein called Rac is crucial for border cell migration in fruit fly ovaries. 

This protein arose early on in eukaryote evolution, and scientists learned that it is nearly universally required for cell migration throughout eukaryotes: from simple protozoa to humans, the press release read.

But Murphy also noted that a hyperactive form of the protein appeared to be toxic.

And that process also occurs in humans with a rare kind of immunodeficiency as utated cells with hyperactive Rac eat the individual’s T-cells, which are a central component of the adaptive immune system.

“Cells expressing active Rac eat their neighbors alive,” Montell, Duggan Professor and Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, said in a press release.

“It’s wild.”

By 2020, Assistant Professor Meghan Morrissey joined the team and in her talk at UCSB explained how she was engineering immune cells called macrophages to eat and kill cancer cells, an approach called CAR-M.

After Morrissey joined the university, she and Montell began working to coax the CAR-Ms to consume more tumor cells and found that adding hyperactive Rac to those CAR-Ms enhanced their ability to eat and destroy cancer cells, according to the press release.

Funding from the pioneer award will help the team further develop its Rac-enhanced CAR-M (Race-CAR-M) approach. 

Montell said she plans to test the technique in mouse models and hopefully advance the technology toward clinical application, according to a press release.

She noted that the team also wants to understand precisely how active Rac produces this amazing effect and develop simpler methods to deliver the therapy so that it will be more affordable and accessible.

“I’m tickled that this bizarre observation in fruit flies might ultimately improve cancer treatment,” Montell said.

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