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Patients and communities served by the University of Illinois Cancer Center and UI Health know all too well the deadly nature of untreatable breast cancer. In response, awardees of the Cancer Center’s 2026 Team Science Award have proposed studying how to build specialized blood vessel pipelines in and around breast tumors to turn on a tap of immune cells into the tumor, which could guide the development of innovative drugs to maximize the attack on metastatic breast cancer.

Many cancers, such as lung cancer and melanoma, respond to drugs that enhance the immune attack or prevent physiological blocks to the immune attack of tumors. These cancers respond to a class of drugs known as Immune Checkpoint Blockade (ICB). Unfortunately, metastatic breast cancer responds poorly to ICB therapy. For the approach to work against breast cancer, immune cells must enter and infiltrate the tumor and find metastases, which is the impetus for studying how to build these specialized pipelines, in the form of blood vessels called high endothelial venules (HEV).

The goal of the Cancer Center’s $150,000, one-year Team Science Award is to advance science and discovery by accelerating the submission of cancer-focused multi-project grant applications to the National Cancer Institute. The 2026 recipients, led by Principal Investigator and Cancer Center Director Jan Kitajewski, PhD, comprise three teams of Cancer Center scientists, each focused on a scientific goal, and a community partner. They are Cancer Biology Research Program members Ying Hu, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, and Mateusz Wietecha, PhD, DMD, Assistant Professor, Department of Oral Biology; Translational Oncology Research Program member VK Gadi, MD, PhD, Cancer Center Deputy Director and a UI Health medical oncologist specializing in breast cancer; and community partner Joanne Glenn, RN MBA, co-leader of the Cancer Center's Community Advisory Board.

“Collectively, the three teams, a supportive data analysis core, and a community advocate will generate a blueprint designed to build the essential pipeline for immune attack against metastatic breast cancer,” they wrote in the abstract for their project, entitled “Building an Immune Infiltration Pipeline via Tumor-Associated High Endothelial Venules (Build TA HEV).”

Their team-of-teams project is a multi-pronged approach to understand the complex molecules, proteins, cell types, and cell organization of HEVs forming in breast tumors.

One team will consider how best to use ICB therapy by enhancing HEV formation while preventing metastasis; a second team will document how inflammatory factors from the circulatory system contribute to HEVs; and a clinical team will collect breast cancers treated with ICBs to determine whether HEVs are forming and active. A  community-facing portal to share data with other cancer scientists and patients will be developed to help them understand the research and its potential impacts,” the team explained in their proposal.