Category: Volume 2 Issue 1

Plants and their associated microbiomes have co-evolved for 500 million years, developing holobionts (combined host-microbiome system) that provide ecological services such as nutrient utilization, development, and pathogen defense, while also exhibiting emergent metabolic and adaptive traits. This talk presents three case studies on how (1) a kingdom-wide conserved plant defense signal has been co-opted to induce lifestyle changes in soil microbiomes to form beneficial biofilms that benefit plant growth from long distances in the rhizosphere; (2) a universal antioxidant microbial metabolite acts as a sulfur nutritional stress tolerance signal for plants in a trans-kingdom tradeoff for its partitioning between microbiome members and plants, and (3) an ecology-guided framework that integrates natural microbial interaction structure with metabolic complementarity has been successfully used to rationally predict cooperative resource exchange for designing beneficial consortia to improve growth promotion and protection. Examples of use of integration of genomic, metabolomic, machine learning and field trials will be shared to demonstrate the path from discovery to translation.

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The 4^th International Conference on Plant Science Research (Plant-2026) was successfully held during April 27 – 29, 2026 in San Francisco, California, USA. The conference was organized by USG United Scientific Group and brought together researchers, academicians, industry experts, and students from various countries to discuss recent advancements and future directions in plant science research.

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Immune checkpoint blockers (ICBs) have revolutionized the treatment of multiple malignancies. However, <20% of patients currently benefit from these therapies. Similarly, CAR-T cells have revolutionized the treatment of hematological malignancies but have not been effective against solid tumors. We have demonstrated that this limited efficacy is due to abnormal tumor microenvironment (TME). The dysfunctional tumor vessels not only inhibit infiltration of immune cells (nascent, reactivated with ICBs, or adoptively transferred, such as CAR-T cells) into tumors, but also create a hypoxic and acidic microenvironment that suppresses the function of immune cells after they accrue in tumors. In 2001, I proposed that judicious use of anti-angiogenic agents – that were originally developed to starve tumors – can “normalize” tumor vessels and improve the delivery and efficacy of concurrent therapies. Our preclinical finding that vascular normalization can improve immunotherapy was confirmed by others in phase III trials on combining antiangiogenic therapy with ICBs for lung, kidney, liver, and endometrial, led to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approvals of seven such combinations for these cancers, and formed the foundation of novel bifunctional antibodies that target both VEGF and PD1/L1. Additionally, we discovered that anti-hypertensive drugs capable of “normalizing” the tumor matrix and stromal cells can reprogram the TME to an immunostimulatory milieu and improve the delivery and efficacy of cancer therapies. A phase II trial led by my clinical collaborators provided evidence in support of this concept for improving the treatment outcome for patients with pancreatic ductal.

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