Antibody-drug Conjugate Use in Cervical Cancer
Antibody-drug Conjugate Use in Cervical Cancer
About Me
My name is Melody Woodward (she/her/hers) and I am a Biology with Biochemistry Emphasis major and a French Studies minor. I grew up in Las Vegas, Nevada, and studied for one year at the University of San Francisco before transferring to Macalester. During my time at Macalester I have worked with Dr. Elena Tonc in her immunology lab, as well as Dr. Robin Shields-Cutler in his microbiology lab, I served as the president of the Macalester QuestBridge Student Organization, and I worked as a TA for the genetics lab. For the last two years I have also been working as a medical assistant at the HealthPartners Stillwater Clinic in their family medicine, internal medicine, and urgent care practices. After Macalester, I plan on taking 1-2 years to pursue research and gain more clinical experience before applying to medical school with the goal of being a primary care MD/DO.
Abstract
Antibody drug conjugates (ADCs) have emerged in recent years as a more favorable treatment for cancers due to their ability to site-selectively deliver a cytotoxic drug within the body through antibody-antigen interactions. Despite this, current frontrunning ADC treatments offered for gynecological cancers target folate receptor alpha (FR-ɑ) or tissue factor (TF), both of which are also expressed in healthy tissues where they play critical physiological roles. As a result, this can lead to indiscriminate cytotoxic payload delivery in the body, causing hematologic, ophthalmic, and hepatic side effects in patients. In examining the etiology of cervical cancer, the majority of cases are associated with a Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infection, and infection with high-risk strains like hr-HPV16 and 18 were found to be responsible for 77% of cervical cancer cases worldwide. The commonality of these two strains of hr-HPV is their intracellular expression of the oncoprotein E6, which is responsible for initial mutations of the epithelial cells, evading growth suppressors, resisting cell death, and more. To address the limitations of the current ADC cervical cancer treatments, I propose the use of the antibody Anti-HPV E6 for specific targeting of the oncoprotein E6, which is only present in hr-HPV infected cells and is not naturally found in the human body. While E6 oncoproteins are intracellularly expressed, recent work by Jiang et. al. provides evidence that tumor cell turnover and necrosis in solid cervical tumors releases E6 into the extracellular environment, rendering it accessible to monoclonal antibody (mAb)-based targeting. Thus, the goal of this research is to develop an ADC treatment for cervical cancer that selectively targets hr-HPV E6-expressing cells, thereby minimizing off-target toxicity and side effects for patients.