Peter Lee, City of Hope / Beckman Center, Featured at Imaging Drug Discovery - May 8-10, Boston, MA

Peter Lee, Professor and Associate Chair of Cancer Immunotherapeutics and Tumor Immunology (CITI) at City of Hope and Beckman Research Institute Beckman Center, will speak on "Immune Cells in Tumor-Draining Lymph Nodes: Novel Prognostic Indicators for Breast Cancer" at the 6th Imaging in Drug Discovery and Development Conference (May 8-10, 2013 in Boston, MA). End Quote

(1888PressRelease) March 06, 2013 - Whether tumor-draining lymph nodes (TDLNs) are invaded by cancer cells is a key prognostic indicator for patients with breast and other cancers. Lymph nodes are immune organs and TDLNs are key sites of tumor-immune interactions. Dr. Lee's team has shown that TDLNs may be immunologically altered and demonstrated the clinical significance of T cell and dendritic cell (DC) decreases in predicting relapse in breast cancer. To move beyond numerical changes to address spatial re-organization of cells, his group has developed a quantitative image analysis approach that incorporates 1) multi-color tissue staining, 2) high-resolution, automated whole-section imaging, 3) image analysis algorithms that utilize machine-learning to identify cell types and locations, and 4) spatial statistical analysis to obtain accurate numerical and spatial data of each immune cell subtype in tumor and TDLN samples. This novel approach provides objective assessment of immune alterations within tumors and TDLNs, and data generated are of prognostic and mechanistic value.

Dr. Peter Lee's research is focused on understanding how breast cancer affects host immune responses in patients, with the goal of developing novel treatments to restore/enhance immune function in patients leading to integrated immunotherapy for breast cancer. His group utilizes high-dimensional flow cytometry, quantitative spatial image analysis, and next-generation genomics to dissect the complex interplay between immune/stromal cells and cancer cells within tumors, tumor-draining lymph nodes (TDLNs), and blood. Through image analysis of breast tumors and TDLNs, he and his team have found that immune cell populations as well as their spatial distributions and clustering patterns have strong correlation with clinical outcome. In context of cancer vaccines, they have shown that avidity of vaccine-elicited, antigen-specific T cells is critical for their anti-tumor activity. They are developing vaccination strategies to preferentially elicit high avidity, tumor cytolytic T cells in vivo. They have also developed rapid methods to measure these cells ex vivo. Lastly, they utilize computational modeling and network analysis to compliment our experimental work in analyzing high dimensional data that are generated from our studies. As such, Dr. Lee's group is highly interdisciplinary, combining immunology, pathology, genomics, bioinformatics, mathematical modeling, and computer science.

GTC's 6th Imaging in Drug Discovery and Development Conference brings together experts from academia, government, and industry from the National Cancer Institute, Stanford University, City of Hope and the Beckman Research Institute, Yale School of Medicine, Pfizer, Biogen Idec, PerkinElmer, Eisai, Columbia University, Roche, Sanofi, Janssen, and many more to discuss the most current developments and applications to further advance their molecular imaging projects on drug discovery and development.

This conference is also part of the Drug Discovery Summit 2013, which consists of this track and three other tracks:

7th Drug Design and Medicinal Chemistry
3rd Epigenetics in Drug Discovery
Orphan Drugs Research and Commercialization

For more information, please visit http://www.gtcbio.com/index.php?option=com_conference&file=home&cn=5th%20Molecular%20Imaging%20in%20Drug%20Discovery%20&cid=15&utm_source=pressrelease&utm_medium=email&utm_content=speakerinfo&utm_campaign=6thimaginginddd.

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