Chordoma Foundation Labs

It’s well known that inflammation increases cancer risk, but how? The answer: the epigenome "remembers" inflammation and primes stem cells for cancer. Here is our paper: nature.com/articles/s4158… And a special shoutout to the lead author @snaga13 A 🧵

It's been an incredibly exciting year in metascience at large, and for us at Convergent. Last week, the @NSF announced their Tech Labs Initiative. The week before, we joined teams from our UK FRO Founder Residency (powered by @ARIA_research) in London as they presented the proposals they've been working on since June. All year, our existing Focused Research Organizations (we've launched almost a dozen) have been sharing the fruits of their labor, and we're hard at work on many more new FROs in the pipeline. And this October, like we do every year, we brought our Focused Research Organization leaders, team members, and supporters together for FROCon. Over a few cold, bright, autumnal days in Falmouth, we shared breakthroughs & challenges, identified opportunities for collaboration, and reconnected amidst the day-to-day busy-ness of pursuing our mission. And while we were all in one place, we took a few hours to pull some members of the team aside, to ask them some questions about what we're working on, and why. Here’s the video we made about Convergent. We hope it is a useful artifact for understanding our work, and a helpful preview for what's to come. This year has been a big one, and next year will be even more so. We're so excited about what's to come, and grateful for everyone who's joined us along the way. Happy holidays - from our team to you and yours.

Important new paper reveals critical features of the chordoma immune landscape and lays the foundation for chordoma patients to benefit from immunotherapy advances. In brief, it: - Provides the largest spatial data set to date including single cell RNA-seq, TCR profiling and multiplex immunoflourescence - Reveals three distinct patterns of immune cell composition in chordoma tumors, potentially pointing to a need for treatment strategies tailored for each - Suggests important roles for myeloid cells in regulating anti-tumor immunity, consistent with several prior studies but providing additional nuance - Identifies several potential mechanisms of immune evasion in chordoma and suggests potential strategies for overcoming this evasion - Demonstrates tumor-specific antigen recognition by tumor-resident and peripheral T cells, suggesting potential for adoptive T cell strategies Huge congrats and thanks to the multi-institutional team behind this foundational study, particularly @CatyLeechang, JP Wolinsky, Victor Arrieta, Jessica Du and colleagues at @NorthwesternMed. We're excited to work with them and others to bring targeted immunotherapy to chordoma patients building on these new insights!

grateful to our group involved w/our new #sarcoma SPORE grant. Under @GorlickRichard & Andy Futreal, we have 2 projects (#chordoma & #osteosarcoma). This involves multiple departments. public link: mdanderson.org/research/depar…. Science: Cassian Yee, Shulin Li, Gorlick, & Futreal Clinical: Andy Livingston & I Path core: Alex Lazar & Wei-Lien Wang