2025
"Research is the distance between an idea and its realization."
- David Sarnoff
Role of Lipid Deregulations in Immunogenic Cell Death in Response to Chemotherapy
This study investigates how disruptions in lipid metabolism influence immune-related cancer cell death during chemotherapy. It aims to understand how changes in lipid metabolism influence the ability of chemotherapy to trigger an immune response against cancer. This whole project can be understood through multiple steps.
First step would be to examine how UPR signaling contributes to the induction of ICD, specifically, how ER stress signals promote the release of immunostimulatory molecules that alert and activate immune cells. Next would be examining how chemotherapy-induce changes in lipid metabolism and how these lipid changes influence UPR activation and downstream ICD. Since sphingolipids are key regulators of stress signaling, and membrane dynamics, this step will help to uncover how these lipid changes influence UPR and determine whether altered lipid profiles enhance or suppress ICD and immune activation. And final step would be validating the effect of sphingolipid/ganglioside-mediated UPR and ICD in animal models. This step will help uncover how lipid-driven modulation of UPR affects chemotherapy-induced ICD and anti-tumor immune responses in a live organism. This validation will establish the translational importance of lipid–UPR–Immune pathway crosstalk and its potential as a therapeutic target to enhance chemotherapy efficacy. Overall the big picture of this project is to identify lipid metabolic pathways that can be targeted to make chemotherapy more immunogenic and more effective.
