Sumit Subudhi

About Sumit Subudhi

Ipilimumab is a cancer immunotherapy that has recently been FDA approved for treatment of metastatic melanoma. A phase 3 clinical trial in metastatic prostate cancer patients failed to demonstrate an effect on overall survival but a small subset of patients did respond.

Ipilimumab works by removing an inhibitory signal from T cells, enabling these immune cells to kill tumor cells.

Dr. Sumit Subudhi will examine the tumor and immune biology and clinical outcomes of advanced prostate cancer patients who participated in phase 3 clinical trials with ipilimumab to identify biomarkers for patients that responded to therapy.

Experimental models will be studied to characterize the mechanisms that regulate ipilimumab-elicited anti-tumor responses.

If successful, this project will lead to the identification of biomarkers that predict response to ipilimumab and can be used to select prostate cancer patients who may benefit from this therapy in future clinical trials.

What this means for patients: Cancer immunotherapeutic agents such as ipilimumab can induce durable and potentially curative anti-tumor immune responses, but can be highly toxic. This research will result in discovery of biomarkers to identify patients that will benefit from ipilimumab treatment and enable the use of this drug in selected prostate cancer patients.