{"doi":"10.1016/j.tranon.2024.101966","title":"Photoimmunotheranostics of epithelioid sarcoma by targeting CD44 or EGFR","abstract":"• Established the expression of EGFR and CD44 in patient and xenograft ES cells. • Both EGFR and CD44-based PITs are target-specific and effective treatments for ES. • EGFR is a more suitable target than CD44 in NIR-PIT management of ES. • First study demonstrating the potential use of NIR-PIT to treat soft tissue sarcoma. Epithelioid sarcoma (ES) is a rare soft tissue neoplasm with high recurrence rates. Wide surgical resection remains the only potential curative treatment. ES presents most commonly on the fingers, hands and forearm, making light-based cancer cell-targeted therapies such as near-infrared photoimmunotherapy (NIR-PIT) that is target-specific, but with limited penetration depth, suitable for ES treatment. We established that CD44 and EGFR were overexpressed in ES patient samples and in the VA-ES-BJ human ES cell line. NIR-PIT of VA-ES-BJ cells using antibody photosensitizer conjugates, prepared by conjugating a CD44 or EGFR monoclonal antibody to the photosensitizer IR700, confirmed that NIR-PIT with both conjugates resulted in cell death. Neither treatment with NIR light alone nor treatment with the conjugates but without NIR light were effective. CD44-IR700-PIT resulted in greater cell death than EGFR-IR700-PIT, consistent with the increased expression of CD44 by VA-ES-BJ cells. In tumors, EGFR-IR700 exhibited a higher tumor-to-normal ratio, as determined by in vivo fluorescence imaging, and a higher anti-tumor growth effect, compared to CD44-IR700. No antitumor effect of the EGFR antibody or the photosensitizer conjugate alone was observed in vivo. Our data support evaluating the use of EGFR-IR700-PIT in the management of ES for detecting and eliminating ES cells in surgical margins, and in the treatment of superficial recurrent tumors.","journal":"Translational Oncology","year":2024,"id":459465,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9574,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":257970,"name":"James D. Barnett","orcid":"0000-0002-4692-6656","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":365354,"name":"Yelena Mironchik","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":348938,"name":"John Gross","orcid":"0000-0003-4444-0297","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":262824,"name":"Hisataka Kobayashi","orcid":"0000-0003-1019-4112","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":952317,"name":"Adam S. Levin","orcid":"0000-0003-0450-7821","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":272184,"name":"Zaver M. Bhujwalla","orcid":"0000-0002-6617-9360","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":272183,"name":"Jiefu Jin","orcid":"0000-0002-5318-1111","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":44,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:03:55.280882Z","pmid":"38663219","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}