Dr. Xiuting Liu joined the Department of Medicine in the Division of Oncology as an instructor as of July 2023. She is a young scientist passionate about the field of cancer immunology and will significantly benefit from this training program. She has strong interest in t cancer immunology and cell. During her study as a PHD student, she mainly investigated the immuno-prevention of colitis-associated colorectal cancers. She investigated the negative regulation of Nrf2 on NLRP3 inflammasome activation in macrophages and use Nrf2 inducers to be candidates for the chemoprevention of colorectal cancer. She is also interested in studying how to reverse immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment in colon cancer, by inhibiting IDO for chemoprevention of colitis- associated colon cancer. When she came to Washington university in Saint Louis as postdoc, she kept working on immunology in pancreatic cancer, and she did a lot progression in this field.
Now she spends more on immunotherapy studies in pancreatic cancer and investigated the mechanism of the resistance of Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) inhibition-bases therapies in pancreatic cancer models. This is important as we have a FAK inhibition combined with PD-1 in clinical evaluation here at WUSM and patient have very mixed outcomes. She is also interested in studies about TME, and she worked out how integrin work in macrophages phenotype and found their impacts on T cells and tumor burden, this is important for potential mechanism-based therapeutic strategies for CD11b agonist use and identified potential patient populations more likely to benefit from them. In the future, she will continue her work about combining targeting TME to improve immunotherapy efficiency in both pancreatic cancer and colon cancer.