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University of Illinois Cancer Center member Alexandra Naba, PhD, is the corresponding author of a study in collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim that could pave the way for new discoveries to make immunotherapy more effective against pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), a cancer that has among the worst prognoses.

Published in the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) journal Cancer Research Communications, the study titled “Identification of Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Extracellular Matrix Signatures from In-Depth Proteomic Profiling that Correlate with Lymphocyte Infiltration,” suggests interventions modulating the extracellular matrix (ECM), the complex network of proteins that surrounds cells, could increase immune cell infiltration and responsiveness to immunotherapy. That’s because the ECM is part of the tumor microenvironment, which influences tumor progression and a tumor’s response to treatment. PDAC is often diagnosed at an advanced stage and has a very dense ECM, hindering efficient drug delivery.

Naba, a member of the Cancer Center’s Cancer Biology Research Program, said this is the first publication to have applied proteomics to characterize the ECM of “cold” tumors (those with low immune cell infiltration or activity) and “hot” tumors (those with higher immune activity) in pancreatic cancer. The Naba Laboratory uses proteomics and bioinformatics to study the role of the ECM, with a particular focus on cancer. She is the founder of the Matrisome Portal, the centralized resource for ECM research used worldwide. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The Cancer Center is part of UIC and its academic health system, UI Health. 

Other study authors from the Naba Lab are James Considine, a former Research Specialist, and Dharma Pally, PhD, a Postdoctoral Research Associate. Additional authors are affiliated with the Oncology Discover Research and Global Computational Biology and Data Science Departments at Boehringer Ingelheim.