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2025 Grantee: Alice Dejoux, PhD
Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center
Research Project: Decoding and leveraging autoantibodies to the dark genome proteins in pancreatic cancer
Award: 2025 Pancreatic Cancer Action Network Fellowship, funded by the Francois Wallace Monahan Fund in memory of Michael Insel
Award Period: September 1, 2025 – August 31, 2027
Amount: $175,000
Biographical Highlights
Dr. Alice Dejoux received her PhD in Immunology from the Institut Pasteur (Paris, France) in the lab of Dr. Pierre Bruhns. She studied the drug rocuronium, a neuromuscular blocking agent (NMBA) that is administered during general anesthesia to inhibit muscle contraction, thus allowing intubation before surgery. Her research helped to elucidate the underlying causes of allergic reactions to NMBAs, to improve diagnostic tools following NMBA-mediated allergy, and to validate novel potential therapeutic strategies for the reversal of neuromuscular blockade.
In November 2024, Dr. Dejoux became a post-doctoral fellow co-directed by Dr. David Ting and Dr. Lloyd Bod at the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Ting was the recipient of a 2009 PanCAN Fellowship Award and a 2014 PanCAN Translational Continuation Research Grant. Dr. Dejoux’s current research investigates the role of B cells in the immune regulation of pancreatic cancer, with a particular focus on the involvement of the “dark genome” of pancreatic cancer cells. She ultimately aims to provide unprecedented insights into tumor immunogenicity, immune escape, and identify novel therapeutic opportunities.
Project Overview
Understanding how the immune system responds to pancreatic cancer is a growing area of focus with therapeutic potential, but there is still much that remains unknown. Researchers have been especially focused on studying the interactions between pancreatic cancer and cytotoxic T cells, a type of immune cell that can directly attack cancer cells. However, little is known about the interactions involving B cells, another important type of immune cell that can produce antibodies to protect against infections but that may also have harmful effects in the context of allergic disease, autoimmunity and transplant rejection. Dr. Dejoux aims to better understand anti-tumor antibodies and the B cell response in pancreatic cancer to provide new insights as to how B cell-immunity can be exploited for clinical application that could improve patient outcomes.
For her Fellowship project, generously funded by the Francois Wallace Monahan fund in memory of Michael Insel, Dr. Dejoux will profile patient blood and tissue samples to characterize the relationship between pancreatic cancer and the B cell immune response. Her studies involve quantifying anti-tumor autoantibodies from patient blood samples and correlating their levels with patient survival. Furthermore, Dr. Dejoux will isolate these anti-tumor autoantibodies and B cells from patient blood samples for deeper characterization and functional studies using a pancreatic cancer mouse model. Dr. Dejoux hypothesizes that patients have B cells that produce anti-tumor antibodies which recognize “dark genome” proteins -- special proteins made from hidden parts of DNA that scientists once thought were non-functional. Although normally silent in healthy cells, these dark genome genes have been found to be activated in pancreatic cancer cells, serving as a tumor-specific target for the anti-tumor B cell response. She predicts that unlocking the hidden immune response to the dark genome proteins in pancreatic tumors will open the door for developing vaccines to exploit the anti-tumor B cell response. This research may also allow the use of autoantibody profiles as biomarkers to stratify patients and guide patient care management.
Overall, this work will provide novel insights into the role of naturally occurring anti-tumor antibodies in pancreatic cancer patients and how they may function to delay disease progression. Dr. Dejoux is hopeful that this translational work will ultimately help improve patient outcomes.
