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Colon cancer and immunotherapy research

Dr. Silvia Guglietta, Assistant Professor and immunologist working on colon cancer research at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center
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Dr. Silvia Guglietta, Assistant Professor and immunologist working on colon cancer research at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center

This week Bobbi Conner talks with Dr. Silvia Guglietta about research related to colon cancer and immunotherapy. Dr. Guglietta is an Assistant Professor and immunologist working on colon cancer research at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center.

TRANSCRIPT:

Conner: I'm Bobbi Conner for South Carolina Public Radio with Health Focus here at the radio studio for the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. Research is underway in South Carolina to try to improve immunotherapy treatment for colon cancer. Doctor Silvia Guglietta is here to provide the details. Doctor Guglietta is an Assistant Professor and an immunologist working on research related to colon cancer at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center. Doctor Guglietta, tell us about immunotherapy as a cancer treatment in general.

Dr. Guglietta: Immunotherapy works by giving the immune system the tools or the signal it needs to wake up and attack the cancer. Most of the treatment, you take the brake away from the immune system so that it can work harder. And, others train the immune cells so that they can recognize and kill the cancer more effectively. And in this respect, it's different from the traditional treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

Conner: Is it the case that immunotherapy works for some patients with colon cancer but not others? Is that part of the challenge?

Dr. Guglietta: Yes. So, it's exactly the challenge. And what we are actually seeing is that at the moment, especially for metastatic cancer, only 5% of colorectal cancer patients are actually eligible for immunotherapy, so the 95% of other patients with colon cancer do not respond to the treatment.

Conner: I know last spring, you were awarded an American Cancer Society Research Scholar grant to study improving immunotherapy specifically for colon cancer. What's the goal of this research?

Dr. Guglietta: This research tries to actually address a big challenge in the field, which is that most of the colon cancer are called cold tumors. So, this means that most of the colon cancer do not have enough immune cells for the immunotherapy to work well. So, the focus of our research in this case is to find ways so that we can awaken the immune system and render these cold tumors hot so that the immunotherapy can be more effective.

Conner: And tell us more details about the type of research you're doing and the length of this research.

Dr. Guglietta: I've been working on this research since I joined MUSC, so now it's six years. And, we actually have a very broad spectrum of research in the lab because we have preclinical models, which are very important to first of all understand the mechanisms and also to test the treatments. But of course our research is translational, which means that in addition to these preclinical models, we validate all our observations using archived patient samples. So, we have biopsies from patients with colon cancer on which we validate whatever we identify in our preclinical models.

Conner: How might you build upon this research in the future? Or where might this research be headed next.

Dr. Guglietta: In the future, what we want to take is a fully translational approach, in which specifically, we are trying to generate a molecule that we can use to target this part of the immune system that we consider important for making the cold colorectal cancer tumor hot and so responsive to immunotherapy. And in this context, we are collaborating with bioinformaticians and bioengineers to design a new molecule that will be important for this approach.

Conner: Doctor Guglietta, thanks for information about your colon cancer research.

Dr. Guglietta: Thank you very much.

Conner: From the radio studio for the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, I'm Bobbi Conner for South Carolina Public Radio.

Health Focus transcripts are intended to accurately represent the original audio version of the program; however, some discrepancies or inaccuracies may exist. The audio format serves as the official record of Health Focus programming.

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Bobbi Conner has been producing and hosting public radio programs for over 30 years. She was the longtime host of the national Parents Journal public radio program. Conner has lived in the Charleston area for over twenty years.