Our study, led by Dr. Patricia Tiburcio, showed that blocking protein recycling may help fight anaplastic Wilms Tumor—a rare, aggressive childhood kidney cancer. Combining bortezomib with dactinomycin made tumors more sensitive to treatment in the lab. doi.org/10.1016/j.xc...

Congratulations to Claudette Fraire, Kavita Desai, Indumathy Jagadeeswaran, and others, for their work showing how microRNA loss drives a mouse model of a childhood cancer called pineoblastoma! @genesdev.bsky.social genesdev.cshlp.org/cgi/content/...

Lastly, using public data from adult cancers, we showed that microRNA pathway alterations were linked to immune gene expression signatures and better response to ICIs.

The immune subset was also enriched for beta-catenin and microRNA pathway mutations. We verified that Wnt signaling induced PD-L1 expression in Wilms tumor cells. We also showed that knocking down DROSHA or DICER1 in Wilms tumor cells caused a robust increase in PD-L1.

Chemotherapy-treated tumors were in this immune subset. In public RNA-seq from an independent group of tumors, chemo exposure was also associated with immune gene expression. In the lab, we found that some chemotherapies, like doxorubicin, were particularly effective at inducing PD-L1.

We studied Wilms tumor, the most common childhood kidney cancer, which has low mutational burden. Using protein arrays, we were surprised to find that about a subset show upregulation of immune markers.