Goal: Immuno-oncology has been involved among the most important cancer therapies after surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy in the last decade. This approach is very promising because the body uses its own immune system to target cancer cells and has a long-term antitumor effect. In order for cancer immunotherapy to be successful, the recognition of cancer cells by the immune system needs to be increased. Another point of view to the same treatment approach is to increase the recognition of cancer cells by genetic modifications, unlike the modification of immune system cells. For this purpose, it is aimed to use the CRISPR/Cas9 gene edition system for the knock-out of the programmed cell death receptor (PD-1) ligand (PD-L1) which is the one of the immune check point proteins. In this proposal, iRGD-mediated functional solid lipid nanoparticles (fSLN-iRGD) will be produced as a non-viral delivery system that can be targeted to the specific tumoral region for delivering the developed vectors.
15 April 2019 – 15 April 2022
TUBITAK 1001 Project
Team: Hasan Akbaba, Gülşah Erel-Akbaba, Şerif Şentürk, A. Gülten Kantarcı