Publications by authors named "Christina Hartl"

Objectives: Chronic diarrhea, villous atrophy and/or increased intraepithelial T-lymphocytes (IEL) occur in many inflammatory disorders including celiac disease (CD). However, a definite diagnosis is difficult to make in some patients despite an extensive diagnostic work-up. Clinical outcomes and histological phenotypes of such patients we refer to as unclassifiable enteropathy (UEP) remain unclear.

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Despite objective responses to PARP inhibition and improvements in progression-free survival compared to standard chemotherapy in patients with BRCA-associated triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), benefits are transitory. Using high dimensional single-cell profiling of human TNBC, here we demonstrate that macrophages are the predominant infiltrating immune cell type in BRCA-associated TNBC. Through multi-omics profiling we show that PARP inhibitors enhance both anti- and pro-tumor features of macrophages through glucose and lipid metabolic reprogramming driven by the sterol regulatory element-binding protein 1 (SREBP-1) pathway.

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Diarrhea is among the most frequently reported symptoms in clinical practice. Acute diarrhea is usually caused by infectious agents with a self-limited disease course. In contrast, differential diagnosis of chronic diarrhea may be challenging.

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Background: Despite major advancements in immunotherapy among a number of solid tumors, response rates among ovarian cancer patients remain modest. Standard treatment for ovarian cancer is still surgery followed by taxane- and platinum-based chemotherapy. Thus, there is an urgent need to develop novel treatment options for clinical translation.

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Purpose: Hormone receptor-positive/HER2-negative (HR/HER2) breast cancer is associated with low levels of stromal tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (sTIL) and PD-L1, and demonstrates poor responses to checkpoint inhibitor therapy. Evaluating the effect of standard chemotherapy on the immune microenvironment may suggest new opportunities for immunotherapy-based approaches to treating HR/HER2 breast tumors.

Experimental Design: HR/HER2 breast tumors were analyzed before and after neoadjuvant chemotherapy.

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Cancer immunotherapy can confer durable benefit, but the percentage of patients who respond to this approach remains modest. The ability to concentrate immunostimulatory compounds at the site of disease can overcome local immune tolerance and reduce systemic toxicity. Surgical resection of tumors may improve the efficacy of immunotherapy by removing the concentrated immunosuppressive microenvironment; however, it also removes tumor-specific leukocytes as well as tumor antigens that may be important to establishing antitumor immunity.

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Targeted delivery of compounds to particular cell subsets can enhance therapeutic index by concentrating their action on the cells of interest. Because attempts to target tumors directly have yielded limited benefit, we instead target endogenous immune cell subsets in the circulation that can migrate actively into tumors. We describe antibody-targeted nanoparticles that bind to CD8 T cells in the blood, lymphoid tissues, and tumors of mice.

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Low 25-hydroxy vitamin D (25-[OH]-D) serum concentrations have been associated with higher disease activity in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients. In a large cross-sectional study we assessed the vitamin D status in MS patients in relation to seasonality and relapse rate. 415 MS-patients (355 relapsing-remitting MS and 60 secondary-progressive, 282 female, mean age 39.

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Pancreatic cancer is the currently most lethal malignancy. Toward an accurate diagnosis of the disease in body liquids, we studied the protein composition of the secretomes of 16 primary and established cell lines of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). Compared to the secretome of non-tumorous cells, 112 proteins exhibited significantly different abundances.

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Cancer metastasis requires that primary tumour cells evolve the capacity to intravasate into the lymphatic system or vasculature, and extravasate into and colonize secondary sites. Others have demonstrated that individual cells within complex populations show heterogeneity in their capacity to form secondary lesions. Here we develop a polyclonal mouse model of breast tumour heterogeneity, and show that distinct clones within a mixed population display specialization, for example, dominating the primary tumour, contributing to metastatic populations, or showing tropism for entering the lymphatic or vasculature systems.

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