Congratulations to everyone from both labs on the exciting discovery that phosphoethanolamine, a metabolite not previously implicated in immunity, is enriched in tumors and suppresses T cell function and immunotherapy. Lot of exciting work to come to leverage this finding for new methods to improve immunotherapies. Check out the paper, the News and Views, and coverage from the UChicago Cancer Center.

Big congratulations to Patrick Jonker who led a new study from our team determining that pancreatic cancers are sensitive to dietary polyunsaturated fats due to constraints placed on the tumor by the microenvironment. Check it out!

Guillaume in the team published a new review on everything that we have learned about the nutrients that limit cancer cells in the tumor microenvironment in the last few years: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adq7305. Includes a fantastic table bringing together all the nutrient concentrations that we could find that have been measured in the tumor microenvironment.

Big picture, we think these hard numbers are going to be really important for folks studying tumor metabolism to identify metabolic pathways that can be targeted with a wide enough therapeutic window to make it to the clinic.

Congrats Guillaume and hope this is a useful resource for everyone.

Patrick put together a really nice review on how the tumor microenvironment changes lipid metabolism in cancer cells: https://journals.biologists.com/dmm/article/17/9/dmm050814/362067/Metabolic-ripple-effects-deciphering-how-lipid.

Congrats Patrick and excited that this will be a useful resource for cancer biologists interested in using drugs or diets to target lipid metabolism in tumors.

New joint study posted today where we identify a novel immunosuppresive metabolite in the tumor microenvironment with Greg Delgoffe’s team at Pitt.

Thank you to the National Comprehensive Cancer Network for supporting our work identifying new vulnerabilities of pancreatic cancers driven by their abnormal microenvironments!

Congratulations to Juan for winning the Best Dissertation Award for the Committee on Cancer Biology at the 2023 Convocation!

Muir lab was busy at ASCB presenting 4 posters and 3 talks on how microenvironmental metabolic stress reprograms pancreatic cancer cells!

Congratulations to Guillaume Cognet on being awarded a Pancreatic Cancer Action Network Francois Wallace Monahan Fellowship for his studies on how nutrients contribute to chemotherapy resistance in pancreatic cancer!

Congrats to DR. Juan Apiz Saab for successfully defending this thesis!