> Our Work > The Work We Fund

2025 Anthony Pritzker Family Foundation – PCF Young Investigator Award

Developing and Armoring T Cell Receptor Immunotherapy for Prostate Cancer on Multiple High-frequency HLA Alleles

Zhiyuan Mao, PhD
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Mentors: John Lee; Owen Witte

Description:

  • The leading cause of death from prostate cancer is metastatic progression. While many life-extending and palliative treatments for metastatic disease have been approved over the last decade, none are curative. 
  • Dr. Zhiyuan Mao’s research is dedicated to developing immunotherapies for prostate cancer. His recent work has focused on developing T cell receptor (TCR) immunotherapy targeting prostatic acid phosphatase (PAP) in prostate cancer.
  • PAP is an ideal prostate cancer therapy target as it is exclusively present on benign and malignant prostate cells. PAP is also the target of the approved cancer vaccine Provenge®, but this treatment has limited survival benefits in patients with advanced PC. 
  • This project will create more effective PAP-targeted TCR immunotherapies that cover over 90% of the global population, and optimize the preclinical efficacy and safety of these TCR immunotherapies to ready them for clinical testing. This will be accomplished using a new high-throughput TCR immunotherapy development platform that encompasses state-of-the-art protein engineering and armoring engineered T cells with cytokines to reshape the tumor microenvironment.
  • If successful, this project will result in a new effective T cell immunotherapy for prostate cancer that targets the prostate cancer protein PAP, which is ready for testing and validation in prostate cancer clinical trials.

What this means to patients: Immunotherapy has the powerful potential to cause deep regressions and even cures in some types of cancer, but has not yet been optimized in prostate cancer. Dr. Mao’s project will use a novel immunotherapy development platform to develop a new T cell immunotherapy for prostate cancer that will be effective in over 90% of the global population and optimize these candidates for future clinical translation. This could lead to an effective new treatment for patients with prostate cancer.