Proteintech Announces Travel Grant Winners for AACR Annual Meeting 2019

Proteintech, the benchmark in antibodies, today announced the winners of the 2019 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting Travel Grant awards. Uday Pratap of University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and Renzo Perales-Linares of the University of Pennsylvania have each been awarded $1,000 each to cover expenses to attend the 2019 Annual Meeting, being held March 29 ? April 3 in Atlanta, GA.

Choosing the best therapeutic strategy to combat cancer is a key hurdle for physicians. In the case of glioblastoma, there is a great need to discover biomarkers to predict the response to harsh chemo- and radiation therapy. Pratap and colleagues found that estrogen receptor beta functions as a tumor suppressor and sensitizes tumors to these therapies through inhibiting DNA damage repair. Their results suggest that estrogen receptor beta may not only be a useful biomarker, but it may also be useful as a drug target to improve response to therapy.

"I am very delighted to attend my first AACR conference and grateful to Proteintech in making this happen," said Pratap, who will be presenting this work on April 1.

Although simple in concept, cancer vaccines have fallen short of their promise in clinical trials. Perales-Linares and his team have found an effective mixture of antigen, immune cells, and adjuvants to improve the potency of these immunotherapies. The vaccine itself consists of dendritic cells and tumor-associated mitochondrial antigens. The dendritic cells detect the mitochondrial antigens and present them to T cells, activating them to target the tumor. To overcome the tumor's immunosuppressive environment, Perales-Linares and colleagues added antibodies against CTLA4 and PD1 to the treatment regimen. Compared to control mice receiving vaccine alone, the mice receiving vaccine plus checkpoint inhibitors had greater regression of tumor size and increased T cell infiltration. Their results suggest that the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment may have been the limiting factor to previous iterations of cancer vaccines.

"I am very excited for the opportunity that winning this award has given me and I can't wait to share my science in such a cool conference as AACR is," Perales said. Perales will present this research on April 2.

"After decades of chipping away at cancer, our expanding toolkit of CAR-T cells and immunotherapeutics is making tremendous impact on how we treat cancer," says William Olds, scientific officer at Proteintech. "Uday and Renzo are working at the forefront of how we treat and diagnose cancer."

About Proteintech Group

Proteintech is an antibody and human protein manufacturer selling directly to scientists and only selling its own products to maintain the highest level of quality control leading to superior reproducibility and lot consistency. With over 2/3 of the human genome completed, we have a catalog of over 12,000 antibodies against 12,000 targets covering a wide spectrum of research areas. We have been cited in tens of thousands of publications and provide in-house validation of our antibodies in WB, IHC, IF, FC, IP, and CHIP, in addition to performing knock-down siRNA validation of our antibodies. Additionally, we provide human cell-expressed proteins that have authentic glycosylation and folding, yielding higher activity and stability over proteins from other hosts. To learn more about Proteintech and their mission to deliver products directly from their bench to the researcher's bench, please visit www.ptglab.com.