Pinho’s Lab distinguished by the Mizutani Foundation for Glycoscience

Exciting news!

Pinho’s Lab has recently been distinguished by the Mizutani Foundation for Glycoscience, receiving funding for a groundbreaking research project dedicated to harnessing glycans to improve immunotherapies for colorectal cancer (CRC).

 Foto: Egidio Santos/U.Porto

Currently, only a fraction of CRC patients respond to immunotherapies and given the lethality of these cancers, there’s an urgent need to expand the efficacy of these approaches. Although aberrant glycosylation has been widely described in cancer, the translation of these insights into clinical practice has lagged behind. As such, Pinho’s Lab is dedicated to understanding how glycosylation can be leveraged to bolster the immune response of colorectal tumors in a therapeutic setting.

In particular, the project funded by the Mizutani Foundation is focused on how the glycans at the surface of T lymphocytes impact their response to cancer. In collaboration with research teams from the United States, Germany and Switzerland, and with the Porto University Centre Hospital as well as Porto Cancer Institute (IPO) the project’s aim is to advance glycoengineering as a novel approach to enhance the anti-tumoral properties of T lymphocytes. Therapeutically, this can lead to higher efficacy of current immunotherapies, including even the use of CAR-T cells.

For Pinho’s Lab, this funding is a reflection of the enormous transformative potential of glycobiology in the clinical context, fostering improved approaches to manage and treat cancer.