Dr. Dimou attended medical school at the University of Athens Medical School where he earned a M.D. degree and developed his interest in lung cancer research.

Dr. Dimou completed his post-doctoral fellowship at the Yale University School of Medicine in 2011and his residency in Internal Medicine at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in 2014. In 2017, he completed his Hematology/Oncology Fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina and became Medical Oncology and Hematology certified by the Board of Internal Medicine. In 2019, he completed an advanced fellowship in Investigational Cancer Therapeutic Thoracic Oncology at the University of Colorado.

In 2018, he received the Travel Award for Advanced Course in Basic and Clinical Immunology from the Federation of Clinical Immunology Society. That same year, Dr. Dimou won the AACR-Conquer Cancer Foundation of ASCO Young Investigator Award for Translational Cancer Research. His winning project established the foundations of the work that is currently being funded by A Breath of Hope Lung Cancer Foundation.

Dr. Dimou is thrilled to win the A Breath of Hope 2023-2025 Peg’s Fight for Life Award for his project BiTE to target EGFR peptide: HLA class I complexes in EGFR mutant lung cancers. He is excited to continue his work on strategies to overcome resistance to immunotherapy in EGFR and other mutation-driven non-small cell lung cancers (NSCLC).

The EGFR gene provides instructions for making a receptor protein called the epidermal growth factor receptor. EGFR mutant lung cancer is caused by a mutation in the EGFR gene that causes cells to grow at abnormal rates and form tumors. Biomarker testing can identify an EGFR mutation, and advances in lung cancer treatment have made it possible to target these proteins to stop the growth of cancer cells.

About the project: The immune system recognizes EGFR mutations as “non-self” in certain patients with EGFR mutant lung cancer. However, immunotherapy in the form of immune checkpoint inhibitors has not been successful in this patient population. In this project, Dr. Dimou will screen a lung cancer patient-derived library of antibody sequences to develop a compound that engages the immune system, specifically toward EGFR mutations. The approach will leverage unique aspects of the immunobiology in mutant EGFR lung cancer to deliver a personalized immunotherapeutic for further preclinical and clinical development.

Summary of the project: To date, we have begun to develop a novel drug with anticancer activity that specifically targets the lung cancer causing EGFR mutation with a design that engages the immune system against the tumor. Although EGFR mutated lung cancers are generally less immunogenic, EGFR mutations themselves can draw EGFR specific immune responses in a subset of cases. This depends on the type of EGFR mutation and the type of human leukocyte antigen (HLA), a highly diverse feature of the immune system. In the human disease, a population of anti-cancer T cells – a particular type of cancer fighting immune cells called T lymphocytes – recognizes certain combinations of EGFR mutations with HLA types and functions protectively. The drug in this work is designed to mimic this physiological mechanism; instead of having a specific T cell population that is naturally raised against the tumor, the drug will artificially bridge the target (EGFR mutation in combination with HLA type) with the immune system in the form of random T cells. To construct the drug, as a first step we have proposed to screen a library of antibodies and select hits if they selectively bind EGFR mutations in combination with certain HLA types but not normal EGFR (control with no mutation) in combination with the same HLA type. As a second step, we will use the top antibodies that emerged in the screen as a backbone for a bispecific T cell engager (BiTE), a drug that engages non-specific T cells against our project’s specific targets: mutated EGFR. 

Summary of progress so far: Creative Biolabs, a biotech company that owns a large phage library for the first step (screening) has been engaged. To screen the library, we have selected two combinations of EGFR mutations and HLA types with one control combination for each (4 combinations total).  We have worked with Creative Biolabs to select the appropriate pairs with the highest chance to form stable complexes that can serve as targets for the screen. With the strategy to simultaneously create 2 pairs of targets and controls, we maximize the chances of having at least one stable pair for the screen that will follow. 

Currently, we have created 4 desired stable complexes (2 pairs of target and control). Additionally, we have screened the display phage library for antibody sequences that bind the target but not the control for the first of the target:control pairs. We identified and sequenced a unique sequence, which however upon further validation bound to both the target and the control. We plan to repeat the screen with more intense negative selection to decrease the risk for false positives. This effort is currently under way.

Named Research Awards

This award was named in honor of Peg Fisher-Jullie. For information about how to name a research award in honor or memory of someone, contact Teri Cannon at .