Yale School of Medicine New Haven, Connecticut
Assistant Professor, Department of Internal Medicine Section of Medical Oncology Yale School of Medicine New Haven, Connecticut
American Association for Cancer Research
Identifying immune biomarkers of treatment adverse events.
Breast cancer treatments are often accompanied by side effects that can range from minor to severe. Severe side effects often require dose reductions or treatment pauses that may impact patient outcomes. In some cases, chemotherapy or immunotherapy treatments can cause autoimmune and other immune-mediated adverse events (AEs) but the causes are poorly understood. B cells are a type of white blood cell that create antibodies that recognize foreign invaders in the body as well as autoantibodies that respond to a person’s own organs or tissues. B cells are present in the tumor immune microenvironment but are generally ignored. As such, there is limited knowledge about how B cells contribute to AEs caused by therapies. Dr. Blenman’s goal is to identify B cell biomarkers and autoantibodies that are associated with therapy-induced AEs in specimens from breast cancer patients.
To accomplish this, Dr. Blenman’s team is establishing a baseline of autoantibodies that are present in healthy individuals that can be compared to the immune profile in patients with breast cancer before, during, and after treatment. In the last year, Dr. Blenman and her team showed that healthy individuals have many autoantibodies in common while others are unique. These common autoantibodies may serve as reference standards or housekeeping markers for comparing immune profiles within and between breast cancer patients. The team then compared autoantibody profiles from cancer patients who had no immune-related AE with patients who had an immune related adverse event and found that there are autoantibodies that are enriched in patients who experienced immune-related AEs. There is evidence that the autoantibodies the team identified target or impact several things: the surrounding structural tissue cells, immune cells, enzymes that regulate proteins, metabolism, and processes by which cells interact and attach to neighboring cells.
Dr. Blenman and her team will continue to build on their work to understand the role of autoantibodies in immune-related AEs, specifically examining how different treatments are associated with autoantibody production. Their results may help to define the role of B cells in mediating therapy-induced side effects across different treatment protocols, help us gain a better understanding of these functions, and help to develop novel tests to predict immune-related AEs.
Kim RM Blenman, PhD, MS is an immunologist and clinical chemist who uses and develops novel software tools to understand the mechanisms responsible for disparities in disease pathogenesis and therapeutic response. She earned a doctorate in immunology, a master’s in clinical chemistry, and a bachelor’s in chemistry from the University of Florida. Dr. Blenman also has a certificate in Drug Development and Regulatory Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco. She had the privilege of learning and working on drug discovery and clinical development at Procter & Gamble’s Pharmaceutical division as a senior scientist and as a global research director for autoimmune diseases, inflammatory bowel disease, and irritable bowel syndrome. She was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, California. Dr. Blenman is currently an Assistant Professor in the Yale School of Medicine Department of Internal Medicine Section of Medical Oncology and the Yale Cancer Center as well as an Assistant Professor in the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science.
2022
The von Mandl Family Foundation Award
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