Research forum By Jess Kirby From Ring Grant to R01 funding
research in evaluating the efficacy of a minimally invasive hyperthermia technique in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinomas. Based at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Dr. Sheth continues to work on finding new ways to induce hyperthermia in cancer cells with the end goal of immune activation—not just on localized tumors, but on cancer cells throughout the body as well.
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The Ring Grant, which awards up to $150,000 over 2 years for junior interventional radiology faculty members, allowed Dr. Sheth to collect data, conduct multiple research projects and secure additional grants.
n 2018, Rahul Sheth, MD, was awarded the SIR Foundation Dr. Ernest J. Ring Academic Development Grant to further his
Can you tell us a little bit about your research?
Rahul Sheth, MD: Through my work at MD Anderson, I’ve seen that immunotherapy has really come to the forefront of cancer therapy,
and it has revolutionized the care of cancers across the entire spectrum of oncology. For some patients, these drugs work miracles and they go from a Stage 4 disease to being completely cured. Unfortunately, that’s a minority of patients. Most patients don’t, in fact, have any benefit from it.
When patients receive these immunotherapy drugs, they work by telling the body’s immune system to attack the cancer cell and ignore all the signals the cancer cell is giving to shut down. Typically, the immune cells listen
to the cancer cells and don’t attack—so these drugs help teach the immune cells to overcome that. But they can’t overcome every barrier that the cancer cells throw out, which is why most of the time the immune system still doesn’t attack the cancer, even with the immunotherapy drugs on board.
We know the potential for this therapy is there, but a major need in oncology research is how to expand the efficacy across the entire patient population for any given cancer type. As IRs, we have the ability to do various procedures on the tumor to help lower those barriers, such as specific types of local therapies to the cancer cells so they no longer can suppress the immune system. Then, when you administer immunotherapy, the immune cells can attack and eradicate the cancer cells. In addition, the immune cells can then potentially learn to recognize the cancer cell and
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