New Investigator Research Grant Program

T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL) is a fast-growing blood cancer that remains difficult to treat, especially in adults. While many children respond well to chemotherapy, adult patients often have poorer outcomes and fewer effective treatment options. This highlights the urgent need for new therapies that precisely target the cancer directly.
Our research focuses on a protein called TOX, which appears to help leukemia cells survive and continue growing. Recent studies suggest that T-ALL cells strongly and selectively depend on TOX, making T-ALL to be vulnerable without off-targeting risk. However, there is currently no effective drug designed to directly remove this protein from leukemia cells. In this project, my lab will develop a new type of anti-cancer drug called a TOX-PROTAC, which works by recruiting TOX protein to natural waste-disposal system to destroy them. In this strategy, we expect to see a significant degradation of TOX protein in the T-ALL cells. We will then examine what happens when TOX is eliminated—specifically, whether leukemia cells stop growing, lose their ability to survive, or die. We will also study how removing TOX changes the cell’s internal programs to better understand why this protein is so important for the cancer. This project will prove the new concept in T-ALL target therapy and develop a tool kit for T-ALL mechanism study.