PitarresiLab

Congrats to @calvinjohnsonio.bsky.social in the lab for being selected to give a talk at our cancer center retreat. You did a fantastic job!!

Congrats to postdoc @nikitab.bsky.social for being awarded an AACR Scholar-in-Training award for this year's #AACRPan25 conference.

Be sure to check out her poster # B049 today from 6-9pm!

Thank you, Jeremy!

Thanks Giulia! I'm looking forward to watching your talk when it's put on the meeting app!

For those attending the Cancer Cachexia Society @cancercachexia.bsky.social meeting in person who just saw my talk, I know there was no chance for questions for the virtual talks today...but I am happy to connect on here, in the meeting's Whova app, or via email.

Please reach out!

#FOMO

Unfortunately, due to a last minute family medical issue, I will not be able to attend in person but will give my talk virtually and am available on here or via email to discuss our work after!

Excited for my talk tomorrow at the 8th Cancer Cachexia Conference meeting, where I will present our work showing that tumor derived PTHrP is a new driver of pancreatic cancer cachexia.

Check out our preprint for the full story:
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

@cancercachexia.bsky.social

A fantastic write-up about grad student @jessicapeura.bsky.social's recent NIH F31 award and how she uses her life experiences to motivate her work looking at pancreatic cancer metastasis! Pieces like this remind me how lucky I am to be PI, where we get to train the next gen of passionate scientists

As a PI during these tough financial times, we really appreciate societies like @theaacr.bsky.social for supporting our trainees to attend conferences that are critical for their growth!

🙏 Thank you @AACR_CEO Margaret Foti!

Congrats to postdoc @nikitab.bsky.social for winning the Margaret Foti @theaacr.bsky.social Scholar-in-Training Award for next month's Pancreatic AACR conference!

If you see her at the conference, be sure to ask her about her work on PDAC cachexia, bioRxiv link below!

biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Congrats to @calvinjohnsonio.bsky.social in the lab for being awarded a competitive slot on the Innate Immunity T32 @umasschan.bsky.social!

In addition to being an amazing scientist, Calvin is also an elite Cat 2 cyclist. He is the one in black, attacking the breakaway group below!

Adoptively transferred Th17 cells cooperate with host B cells to achieve durable tumor immunity Cole et al. report that adoptively transferred, tumor-specific Th17 cells engage host B cells and drive B cell proliferation and differentiation. These Th17 cells require B cells for sustained immunit...

🧵1/ New in @Cancer_Cell: Our lab discovered that Th17 cells must team up with B cells to eliminate tumors, and prevent it from coming back.
🔗 Read: www.cell.com/cancer-cell/...
🧬This unexpected immune duo sparks tumor immunity.
🖼️Image: See schematic Th17/B cell antitumor action!

Fantastic work as always Cosimo!! Congrats to you and the team, especially first author @yijuan.bsky.social!

Congrats Cosimo!!

a man in a suit and tie is clapping his hands in a room . ALT: a man in a suit and tie is clapping his hands in a room .

Congrats to @calvinjohnsonio.bsky.social in the lab for winning a travel award for the AAI Advanced Course! He's leading the tumor immunology efforts in the lab and I'm excited to see what he learns at the workshop!

🙏 Grateful to the AAI for supporting trainees during these tough financial times!

a man and a woman are standing next to each other in a room and congratulating each other with congrats . ALT: a man and a woman are standing next to each other in a room and congratulating each other with congrats .

NOA!!

🚨 Congrats to @jessicapeura.bsky.social in the lab for getting her NCI F31 notice of award today!! 🚨

With the NIH slowdowns, this has been quite the journey, but I'm happy to see some NOAs coming through for the trainees!

@umasschan.bsky.social

Officially welcoming our 2 new PhD students to the lab today!

Head over to our lab website to check out some fun facts about Paula (co-mentored with the Spinelli lab) and Ethan @ethanhcchang.bsky.social. Excited to have you both on board and watch the team grow...

www.pitarresilab.com/team

1/Meet the MRS ECLC Chairs! Dr. Thomas Cox @trcox.matrixandmetastasis.com is a Professor at the @garvaninstitute.bsky.social focussing on the Extracellular Matrix and Fibrosis in Cancer.
We interviewed Dr. Cox about his role as a founding member of the MRS Early Career Leadership Council 🧵👇

Pancreatic cancer cachexia is mediated by PTHrP-driven disruption of adipose de novo lipogenesis Pancreatic cancer patients have the highest rates and most severe forms of cancer cachexia, yet cachexia etiologies remain largely elusive, leading to a lack of effective intervening therapies. PTHrP ...

Pancreatic cancer cachexia is mediated by PTHrP-driven disruption of adipose de novo lipogenesis
🧪 doi.org/10.1101/2025...

Immensely grateful to all collaborators from the Guertin, @marcus-ruscetti.bsky.social, @game-of-chroms.bsky.social, Zhu, Kremer, Czech, Guilherme, and Hollingsworth labs. you all have made this journey an amazing one.🙏

Most importantly, this paper only came together because of the fantastic community of collaborators we have built over the years.

Really proud of my team led by @nikitab.bsky.social with critical support from Yamini Ogoti, @jessicapeura.bsky.social, and @calvinjohnsonio.bsky.social

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To wrap this story up, we treated KPCY animals with a monoclonal neutralizing antibody against PTHrP (🙏 Richard Kremer), which was able to block wasting and restore DNL. We are hoping this will be a new therapeutic option for patients suffering from cancer cachexia in the near future

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This is where we relied on our adipose tissue expert collaborators (Dave Guertin, Mike Czech, Adilson Guilherme labs), who helped us delete Fasn, a key enzyme in the DNL pathway, in adipocytes. When we injected a non-cachectic cell line into these mice, we found that it became cachectic!

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To figure out how PTHrP mediates adipose tissue wasting, we performed RNA-seq on cachectic iWAT and found the usual players being upregulated (TNF, IL6, etc.), but were surprised to also see a dramatic downregulation of de novo lipogenesis (DNL) in the adipose of cachectic mice

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We knew that adipocytes have high levels of the PTHrP receptor, PTH1R. We deleted Pth1r in adipose and injected our highly cachectic PTHrP-OE cell line. This not only blocked adipose tissue wasting, but also muscle wasting, suggesting that adipose wasting may fuel muscle wasting in this model

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We weren’t sure if PTHrP alone was driving this, so we injected WT animals with recombinant PTHrP and, to our surprise, they started to lose their adipose tissue. This is where things started to get really interesting

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Next, we wanted to establish that PTHrP is sufficient for wasting, so we overexpressed Pthlh in a non-cachectic KPC line with low endogenous Pthlh. This effectively converted the non-cachectic cell line into a cachectic one, which dramatically reduced overall survival

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We saw big differences in adipose and muscle wasting phenotypes in Pthlh-deleted KPCY mice and noted that cachectic PDAC patients had higher tumor cell PTHrP expression in their primary tumors

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It is known clinically that PDAC patients with high PTHrP serum are more cachectic, so we dug a little deeper and found that Pthlh-deleted KPCY mice were resistant to PDAC-associated weight loss. So, it looks like PTHrP is necessary for cachectic wasting in KPC mice

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It started a few years ago when we had this exciting data showing that Pthlh (the gene encoding PTHrP) deletion in KPCY mice dramatically extended survival. We attributed this to a decrease in metastasis in a prior paper, but upon closer examination, we found they were also less cachectic

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