New University of Iowa dean lands $10M research award to fight ovarian cancer

Months before the University of Iowa in May named Jill Kolesar its next College of Pharmacy dean, she applied in January for a $10 million research award to develop a new method for fighting ovarian cancer.

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So when officials with the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health — housed within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — invited Kolesar to the next phase of the application process, she asked, “Would it be OK if I changed institutions at this point?”

“And they said sure,” according to Kolesar, who at the time was a research professor at the University of Kentucky, chair of precision medicine, co-head of the Translational Oncology Program at the Markey Cancer Center, with a joint appointment in gynecologic oncology at the UK College of Medicine.

Fast forward to last week when the White House unveiled the 23 awardees it had chosen from 1,700 submissions to receive a total of $110 million for projects seeking “solutions for health conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women.”

“The University of Iowa will receive $10 million to revolutionize the treatment for late-stage and metastatic ovarian cancer by using personalized nanoparticles to boost a woman’s immune system,” according to a press release from the White House. “Leveraging nanotechnology, the University of Iowa will engineer personalized nanoparticles to use a woman’s own immune system to attack multiple cancers and help more women get the treatment they need to live longer.”

Kolesar’s proposal — now tied to UI — was among six of the 23 awardees the White House highlighted in its funding announcement, reiterating the need for ovarian cancer research by reporting, “More than half of women with ovarian cancer are diagnosed only after the cancer has metastasized, making it harder to treat and reducing survival rates.”

“Ovarian cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, and there are few effective treatments,” said Kolesar, who also is the Jean M. Schmidt Chair in Drug Discovery at Iowa. “We have developed a new therapy that is effective and has few or no adverse effects. This grant supports the first clinical trial of this therapy and the next step in making it available to women who need it desperately.”

‘First in human’

With the $10 million award — $8.8 million of which will go to UI and $1.2 million of which will go to the University of Kentucky and a collaborator there — Kolesar will lead a research team in trying to tap the power of immunotherapy for ovarian cancer.

“Immunotherapy kind of changed the world for people with lung cancer and lots of other cancers,” she told The Gazette. “About 60 percent of cancers are sensitive to immunotherapy, but the other ones are considered immunologically cold. Ovarian is one, pancreas is one, prostate is another. And that's 40 percent of people. So what our therapy does is takes those cold tumors and turns them into immunologically-hot tumors, where the immune system can eradicate the cancer.”

Specifically, Kolesar’s team aims to use an approach that leverages the production of extracellular vesicles — or small fluid-filled sacs released by cells — to change tumor clusters from “cancer supporting to cancer fighting.”

“So this would be the first in human (trial),” she said. “And with the first in human, you always have to escalate the dose to make sure and see if it's safe. So that's basically what we're going to do with most of the money. That's big part of it.”

The other part ties to a manufacturing process they’ve developed.

“So we are going to get experts and kind of streamline the manufacturing process to make it less expensive.”

Eligible participants must already have received treatment for ovarian cancer and had it come back — which Kolesar said happens with most people.

“We call it the second-line setting — so if people have recurrent ovarian cancer,” she said. “That’s pretty common … Almost everybody’s cancer comes back, like 80 percent.”

Trial participants will be treated at the UI’s Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center.

“If people want to come to Iowa for this clinical trial, we would be happy to have them,” Kolesar said. “But we anticipate it’s mostly going to be Iowa residents.”

Iowa has the fastest-growing rate of new cancers in the nation, with 130 ovarian cancer deaths predicted in the state this year, according to the 2024 Cancer in Iowa report.

Nationally, ovarian cancer is projected to kill more than 12,700 women this year, according to the American Cancer Society. And two of three women who are diagnosed and undergo chemotherapy experience a recurrence.

“We anticipate the anticancer activity of (extracellular vesicles), combined with localizing ability, will be able to eradicate small numbers of cancer cells and help the immune system eliminate them,” researchers wrote in their grant summary.

Other funded research

President Joe Biden in the last year established the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health — a new research and development funding agency — as part of his “White House Initiative on Women’s Health Research” aimed at changing how the country approaches and funds women’s health research.

The “Sprint for Women’s Health” — through which Kolesar’s project and others were funded — was the first major deliverable on that White House initiative, attracting applications from 45 states and 34 countries.

Like bringing her award to Iowa, Kolesar said she had other funded research ongoing in Kentucky when she was hired — and some of that money followed her here, while a portion stayed.

“One was for a clinical trial, and it just didn't make any sense to move it because it was almost done,” she said.

Although none of the revenue from her nine patents or pending patents will come to Iowa, any new patents applied for through this ovarian cancer research will sit with UI.

When she was chosen for the UI dean position earlier this year, Kolesar also was involved with two startup companies she founded: VesiCure Technologies and Helix Diagnostics. She will remain involved in those companies — based in Kentucky — even though she’s now at Iowa.

“But the university has a conflict-of-interest policy that's put in place to manage any conflict,” she said. “So, for example, I can't buy things from my company, and I can't work on things for my company during regular work hours, and I can't do a clinical trial that's sponsored by my company.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com