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2025 John Paulson – PCF Young Investigator Award

Dissecting the Significance of Immune Infiltration in Hormone Sensitive Prostate Cancer with Highly-Multiplexed Immunofluorescence

Jeremiah Wala, MD, PhD
Harvard: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI)

Mentors: Eliezer Van Allen; Peter Sorger

Description:

  • Immunotherapy can have a significant anti-tumor impact but has not been optimized in prostate cancer. A subset of untreated hormone sensitive prostate cancer (HSPC) tumors exhibit a distinct immune-activated state, which are predictive of immunotherapy responsiveness and improved outcomes in other cancer types. This indicates that early immunotherapy in some patients with HSPC with may be effective, but biomarker tests are needed to identify these patients and test this approach in clinical trials. 
  • Dr. Jeremiah Wala seeks to characterize the tumor-immune microenvironment in HSPC and identify biomarkers that may predict improved immunotherapy responses. 
  • In this project, Dr. Wala will characterize immune activation states and their spatial organization in HSPC prostatectomy samples, and identify features associated with improved metastasis-free survival. Further, he will develop a deep-learning model to detect immune infiltration in prostatectomy samples and determine its prognostic impact in high-risk HSPC.
  • If successful, this study will establish immune infiltration and immune aggregates as prognostic biomarkers in HSPC, enabling risk stratification and guiding immunotherapy trials. By leveraging new high-throughput machine-learning-based immune profiling techniques, this work aims to develop a practical immune profiling test that can be applied in standard clinical practice.

What this means to patients: Immunotherapy has demonstrated significant and even curative potential in many cancer types, but remains to be optimized for patients with prostate cancer. Dr. Wala’s project will characterize immune states in patients with prostate cancer and create a machine-learning-based immune profiling biomarker test to identify patients likely to respond to immunotherapy. This will inform the design of immunotherapy clinical trials, and could greatly improve treatment and outcomes for patients.