Dr. Bhatt on Finding a PD-L1 Pathway of Resistance in RCC

Rupal S. Bhatt, MD, PhD, associate professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, clinical fellow, Hematology-Oncology, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, discusses the potential identification of a pathway of resistance for PD-L1 in renal cell carcinoma.

To study the pathways, Bhatt and her team developed antibodies to inhibit the HHLA2 signal. An inhibitory and stimulatory receptor was found in HHLA2, which Bhatt compares with the CD28 and CTLA-4 pathways.

Bhatt and her team hypothesize that antibodies will block the inhibitory receptor signal but preserve the stimulatory receptor signal, which could be a novel therapeutic in kidney cancer. In the next few years, the goal is to test a panel of antibodies against HHLA2 in the receptors to understand more about the function, study the utility of HHLA2 as a biomarker, and begin a phase I clinical trial with the appropriate antibody target, concludes Bhatt.