Project 467110

Adoptive Cell Transfer (ACT) is becoming a popular therapy option for cancer. This treatment involves transferring healthy immune cells into patients to kill cancer cells. Thus far, ACT seems promising for blood cancers, such as leukaemia, but it is not as effective for other types of cancer, such as solid tumours. One explanation is that the microenvironment around the tumour is hostile to healthy immune cells. The tumour cells compete with healthy immune cells for essential nutrients, such as sugars, which limits the ability of immune cells to function properly. A solution to this problem is to prepare the immune cells for the hostile environment before transferring them into patients. One method involves starving the immune cells of sugar for a short period of time, which triggers an increase of a specific type of sugar transporter, known as Glut1, on their surface. We know that the starved cells are better at killing cancer cells, but how Glut1 improves the ability of starved immune cells to fight cancer is not known. We hypothesize that the higher Glut1 levels allow the starved immune cells to take in more sugar, survive longer, and more effectively kill cancer cells. To test this, we will remove Glut1 from starved immune cells and see whether it affects their ability to kill tumour cells. With this project, we hope to identify the role of Glut1 in starved immune cells, with the aim to improve the success rates of ACT for a wider variety of cancers.