Presentation Time: 4:50-5:10
Home University: North Carolina Central University
Research Mentor: Adam Palmer, Department of Pharmacology
Program: CSF
Research Title: Comparisons of Resistances and Sensitivities to Chemotherapies in T-Cell Lymphomas
The Non-Hodgkin’s T cell lymphoma (TCL) patient population consists of several ​cancer subtypes which have been historically treated with a single one-size-fits-all chemotherapy regimen known as CHOP. Several TCL subtypes do not respond well to CHOP, however, as nearly 40% of patients relapse within 2 years of treatment. There is a wide landscape of alternative chemotherapies that promote cures to TCLs in the relapsed and refractory setting, and it is likely that the varied effectiveness of these drugs is due to the broad biological heterogeneity of the overall patient population. We sought to determine which of 28 available chemotherapies are most effective at killing different TCL subtypes. We collected dose response measurements in vitro for three TCL cell lines after three-day chemotherapy treatments. Our results show that the two cell lines of the same subtype (SR-786 and Karpas-299) exhibited similar pharmacological responses to chemotherapies, while the third subtype (KHYG-1) displayed distinct sensitivities and resistances. Generally, drugs of similar mechanisms of action demonstrated consistent patterns of cell killing on the same cell lines, but there are notable differences that might correspond to specific molecular targets of these drugs. These experiments serve as initial categorization for a few diverse TCLs. Further dose response measurements with additional TCL cultures could identify more distinct individual responses to guide precision-based treatment approaches for TCL patients.