Brendon M. Stiles MD

Brendon Stiles, MD, is Professor and Chief, of Thoracic Surgery and Surgical Oncology, Department of Cardiothoracic & Vascular Surgery at Montefiore-Einstein. Dr. Stiles is also the Associate Director for Surgical Services at the Montefiore-Einstein Cancer Center. Dr. Stiles’ clinical focus is on the treatment of lung and esophageal cancer and on neoadjuvant immunotherapy. Taking a patient-first philosophy, Dr. Stiles provides world-class personalized care, using minimally invasive, organ-sparing techniques and targeting surgical therapy to the specific needs of the patient and his or her individual tumor.

Dr. Stiles is also heavily involved with translational and basic research.  Translationally, Dr. Stiles is interested in neoadjuvant immunotherapy and in predicting and augmenting responses to immunotherapy.   In the laboratory, he has been funded by the AATS, TSF, the Lung Cancer Research Foundation, the DOD CDMRP Lung Cancer Research Program, and the Mark Foundation.

Dr. Stiles' laboratory currently investigates the protein ART1, an extracellular mono-ADP-ribosyltransferase.  Recently, Dr. Stiles and his team discovered that ART1 may play an important role in one mechanism of resistance in lung cancers. ART1 mono-ADP-ribosylates the P2X7 receptor (P2X7R) in immune cells, which ultimately causes NAD-induced cell death (NICD) in T cells, macrophages, and dendritic cells. They found ART1 to be highly expressed in multiple human non-small cell lung cancer cell lines and in the majority of human lung adenocarcinomas they sampled.  ART1 expression allows cancers to blunt the immune response against them. Indeed, they found that inhibiting ART1 with a therapeutic monoclonal antibody in mouse models of lung cancer caused a dramatic reduction of tumor burden and an enrichment of immune cells in the tumor.

Current efforts are underway to better understand the regulation of ART1 expression, to identify more targets of extracellular mono-ADP-ribosylation, and to refine pre-clinical models to test their therapeutic antibody targeting ART1.