What is Team Basic?
Our Research Problem
Melanoma ranks as the sixth highest contributor to cancer death in the United States. While most skin cancers can be cured if found and treated early, the long-term survival rate for those with melanoma and develop metastatic neoplasms is only 15%. In 1999, 36,299 individuals were diagnosed with melanomas of the skin. By 2010, this number had nearly doubled, as 61,061 individuals in the United States were diagnosed.
Common treatments for melanoma patients include excisional biopsies, Moh's micrographic surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. However, these treatments are costly, long, and painful for the patients.
About Team Basic
Melanoma
Skin cancer is the most common of the 200 different cancers known to affect humans. Melanoma affects the pigment producing cells in your skin called melanocytes. The long-term survival for those who develop metastatic neoplasms is only 15%.
Current Treatments for Melanoma
Current treatments include:
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surgery
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chemotherapy
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radiotherapy
Our Goal: Our proposed research project is to address the lack of effective, consistent, and long-lasting treatments to melanoma cancer. Current treatments, such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy reduce the tumor, but also damage healthy tissue cells around the site. Our project aims to use a novel technique for treatment, Adoptive Cell Transfer Therapy, that uses the patient's own immune cells to target the tumor without destroying surrounding tissue cells.
Our project aims to combine 1) Bicarbonate injections and 2) Adoptive Cell Transfer Therapy to determine the efficacy of Adoptive Cell Transfer Therapy after the neutralization of the pH with bicarbonate.
We will use both in-vitro and in-vivo experiments to test whether buffering the pH of B16-OVA melanoma to reduce the acidity will enhance the efficiency of the stimulated immune cells.
Research Questions​
1) How does neutralization of the acidic extracellular environment of melanoma tumors affect the efficacy of adoptive cell transfer therapy?
2)How does sodium bicarbonate impact the effectiveness of treating melanoma tumors with reprogrammed T lymphocytes selected for adoptive cell transfer therapy?
Research Methodology
Our proposed research design consists of two objectives.
The first objective is to establish a connection between the application of bicarbonate to tumor cells and an increased pHe. We will also be analyzing any changes in growth and growth rates. We are assessing growth in order to see if efficacy of the combined treatments is improved because both treatments work independently or solely due to the neutralization of pHe.
The second objective will focus on isolating immune cells from melanoma tumors in vivo (as they will have already demonstrated cancer recognition), reprogramming these T-lymphocytes to become more effective killers, and inserting those same cells back into mice with melanoma. Simultaneously, the malignant tumors will be treated with bicarbonate. This co-treatment is designed to assess the effects of extracellular pH neutralization, if any, on the efficacy of adoptive cell therapy.
