Early Career Investigator (ECI) Short-term Scientific Stay Award (S3A)

The Winner:  

Mjriam Capula, a PhD student at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, Italy, was the winner of the prestigious Short-term Scientific Stay Award 2022 (S3A). She collaborated with a Cancer Research Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as part of her award-winning endeavour. 

The project: 

Pancreatic cancer (PC) is a fatal malignancy without effective treatments because of the drug-resistant nature of this tumour. Thus, a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying PC chemoresistance is essential to improve the overall prognosis.

Tumour-associated microbiota has recently emerged for its potential role in mediating resistance to several anti-cancer agents. Expression of the long-variant cytidine deaminase (CDA) by intratumor bacteria has been shown to be responsible for gemcitabine resistance [Geller et al.2017], while Fusobacterium nucleatum, which does not express CDA, can affect drug activities via autophagy modulation [Yu et al.2017]. These findings suggest that chemoresistance conferred by bacteria might be induced by multiple mechanisms. However, the contribution of microbes to chemoresistance is only beginning to be explored and new models to unravel mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are warranted.

So far, most literature focused on identification of PC-specific microbiota, while bacteria-induced chemoresistance has been mainly studied in preclinical models of colorectal cancer.

The purpose of this study is to characterise the ability of selected bacterial species to induce chemoresistance in representative in vitro PC models and to identify the molecular mechanisms underlying this effect via cell proliferation assays and transcriptome analysis.

Results and outputs

The results will be made available upon the completion of the project.