HANAHAN, S.C. (WCBD) – The owner of a fitness training company in Hanahan that has been working with kids and adults for a few years is calling on the community to help keep his business open.

Kendrick Robinson opened The Factory Sports and Fitness Training in Hanahan a year before the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States to help train people in basketball, football, and other athletics.

“It was something that God brought to me. He gave me a vision,” said Robinson. “I wanted to have a facility where the youth in our community could (better) selves and have a safe place where they can come and train.”

“He always helps out. He helps out with kids like schoolwork and stuff like that before training,” said Christian Gray, who has been coming to the program for four years.

Robinson said working with the youth is his passion. But things have been tough financially, he said.

“Our rates are really not expensive, but if they’re not able to do training, we try to do charitable giving would give out free sessions,” explained Robinson.

He went on to say, “We kind of gotten [sic] to a rough patch since Covid. We had a business plan, and it kind of altered all of that, and we’ve been playing catch-up ever since.”

Robinson decided Sunday to let the public know they might have to close next month and started a GoFundMe in hopes of finding some assistance.

“Not something I wanted to go public with, but closed mouths don’t get fed. God revealed that to me, he told me to make sure I keep this place open and get the help that we needed from the community. The response has been, man amazing.”

More than $2,500 has already come in from the community, of the $10,000 they need.

“It’s been amazing to get all the feedback and support from the supporters we’ve had over the years and knowing that we’re doing the right thing just by being transparent with the community and letting them know that it hasn’t always been easy.”

If you would like to help, please click here.

HANAHAN, S.C. (WCIV) — Some Hanahan residents are unhappy about potential plans for a new apartment complex.

The plot is 17 acres of land near Tanner Hall. Right now the land is zoned for single-family use, but the developer wants to change it to multi-family use to build about 300 apartments.

"It's zoned single-family dwellings and it would hold about 70 additional homes. It's up for rezoning now," said Sean Kennedy, a Tanner Hall resident of 16 years. "I want to point out- this is for the second time in less than six months."

Kennedy says he wants the acres to be homes since that is what the land is zoned for. There are signs all throughout the neighborhood saying, "Say no to re-zoning."

"We have more apartments than what is needed," Kennedy said. "You can go half a mile, a 5-minute walk, and there are hundreds and hundreds of apartments."

"They are going to negatively affect my home, my community, my neighborhood, and my quality of life," said Brittany Wood, a Tanner Hall resident of two years.

The developer, Panther Resident Management, feels differently than the residents. They are requesting the City of Hanahan to re-zone the property.

"We think this project is a huge win-win for the City of Hanahan," said Eric Wardrop, principal at Panther Residential Management. "There are housing shortages all over Charleston. Hanahan is no different."

The planning commission meeting was supposed to happen Tuesday night but now is pushed to February. Wardrop said they have been meeting with city officials and residents to build the best plan for the community.

"[The current plans] included shifting buildings, enhancing landscaping buffers, enhancing security and procedures throughout the complex, fence around the gated community," said Wardrop. "A project like this is not detrimental to Hanahan where housing is expensive; not a lot of affordable options."

Still, Tanner Hall residents are concerned.

"No one wants to see Hanahan become a sea of apartment complexes like you can see in other parts of Charleston," said Wood.

The next planning commission meeting for the City of Hanahan is on February 2.

HANAHAN, S.C. (WCIV) — The only thing more silky smooth than Willie Brown’s swing is the smile he cracks while taking his cracks several times a week at the Hanahan Athletic Fields.

“I can run the bases. I can throw. I can hit, both sides. I can hit both sides.” says the affable 77-year-old North Charleston resident.

He’s a switch-hitting phenom. He still models his game after the greats of it.

“As a boy coming up, my two favorite players were Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle. Both played CF and because of Mickey, I became a switch hitter. Those guys were my two idols coming up.”

Being out here, wonderful. His journey to get here after graduating from the old Bonds-Wilson HS, impactful.

“Hoped one day I’d have an opportunity to play, got out of the Army, Vietnam veteran, 64-67."

He found a tryout in Fernandina Beach, Florida, and what do you know? The unknown kid from South Carolina signed with the Montreal Expos.

“In 1969 and '70, I played with the West Palm Beach Expos Single A club. I was promoted to Quebec City, Expos AA. I led the league in hitting for half the season.”

Then, a crossroads. Playing seven days a week didn’t work for this 7th Day Adventist.

“I had to choose between God and baseball. Wanted to do this all my life, but the good lord brought me this far all my life- I’ll stick with God and beliefs. Nothing to do with ability. It hurt, but it was my choice.”

He chose a life of normalcy. He married and worked, he always loved baseball. Then, in 1995, at 50 years old, he found the Lowcountry Senior Softball Association.

He was just old enough to play.

“Treat me like I am one of their family members, joined in 1995 as the only African American on the team- treated me that time if I was a member and haven’t stopped yet. I enjoy the guys, comradery, friendship more than anything else. God first, my wife second, all these guys together in third place.”

He walked away from the game once. He doesn’t have to now.

“I’m going to die, maybe on the field, but I’ll be with these fellas as long as I can, as long as I live.”

For more information on the softball league, click here.

HANAHAN, S.C. (WCIV) — Hanahan wants to expand.

The city of Hanahan has developed a master plan to revitalize its town center and bring more businesses to the area.

Kristen O'Neill is a part owner of Theory Collective in Hanahan. The hair salon opened about a year ago.

"Our team is growing. It's great. We offer more services and see more clients," said O'Neill.

O’Neill said she is happy the city is working to bring in more businesses. She thinks more storefronts could mean more traffic at the salon.

"I think it would be great, I mean, especially on Yeamans Hall Road, there is not a whole lot. There's gas stations. It would be great to get a bite to eat up the road," said O'Neill.

She thinks it would be great to work with new businesses.

"We love partnering with local businesses. We have done it in the past and we will do it in the future. However we can support local businesses, we will," said O'Neill.

Mayor Christie Rainwater says there are things that are missing from the city.

"The truth is, we are missing quality businesses, restaurants, boutiques. That’s something people want to see come in. They don’t want to have to go to North Charleston or a neighboring city to go to the doctor," said Mayor Rainwater.

She wants to know what residents see for the future of the town center.

The plan is something they can use to present to those who are interested in coming to the area.

"It really gives us resources that we need to present to people who would like to bring their development or business to Hanahan, and say this is where it may fit best," said the mayor.

The city wants to continue hearing from residents. They have a survey on their website at cityofhanahan.com.

"If you have a dream inside of you and you want to bring it to the downtown of Hanahan, we would love to work with you to do that," said Rainwater.

FMRP and tumor immunity

Many tumors have developed mechanisms rendering them resistant to attack and destruction by the immune system. Zeng et al. report that fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP) is highly expressed in human cancers, and they propose that it is involved in antitumor immunity. FMRP is best known as an RNA-binding protein that regulates the stability and translation of neuronal RNAs. By genetically inactivating the FMRP gene in mouse cancer cells, the researchers found that FMRP-deficient tumors had reduced growth and were more susceptible to attack by T lymphocytes. Tumor cells lacking FMRP showed remodeling of the tumor microenvironment, macrophage polarization, and upregulation of the chemokines involved in effector CD8⁺ T cell recruitment. —PNK

Structured Abstract

Cancer biology and therapy have been transformed by knowledge about immunoregulatory mechanisms that govern adaptive immunity. Although some forms of treatment resistance are related to the intentionally transitory operations of the adaptive immune system, others reflect more subtle requirements to modulate the immune system in different contexts. In this work, we identified an immunoregulatory mechanism involving the neuronal RNA binding protein fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP), which broadly regulates protein translation and mRNA stability and is aberrantly up-regulated in multiple forms of cancer.

This study was motivated by reports that cancer cells naturally overexpressing FMRP, whose loss of expression in developing neurons causes cognitive defects, were invasive and metastatic. We investigated the expression of FMRP in human tumors, further assessed its tumor-promoting functions in mouse models of cancer, and evaluated its association with prognosis for human cancer patients.

When human tumor tissue microarrays were immunostained for expression of FMRP, a majority of tumors expressed FMRP, whereas cognate normal tissues did not. To investigate the functional significance of this broad up-regulation, the FMR1 gene was ablated through CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing (FMRP-KO, where KO indicates knockout) in mouse cancer cell lines that were inoculated into both immunodeficient and syngeneic immunocompetent mice to establish tumors in parallel with wild-type (WT) FMRP-expressing cell lines. Mice bearing FMRP-KO tumors had similar survival compared with isogenic WT tumors in immunodeficient hosts, indicating that FMRP was not involved in stimulating tumor growth per se. By contrast, tumor growth was impaired and survival extended in immunocompetent hosts, implicating the adaptive immune system. Indeed, FMRP-expressing WT tumors were largely devoid of T cells, whereas FMRP-KO tumors were highly inflamed. Depletion of CD8 and CD4 T cells restored tumor growth and reduced survival, implicating FMRP in immune evasion in WT tumors. WT and FMRP-KO tumors were profiled by single-cell RNA sequencing, revealing marked differences in genome-wide transcription and abundance of cancer cells, macrophages, and T cells. To elucidate the effects of this multifaceted regulatory protein, we performed several functional perturbations, revealing that: FMRP-expressing cancer cells produce the chemokine interleukin-33 (IL-33), which induces regulatory T cells, as well as tumor-secreted protein S (PROS1) ligand and exosomes that elicit tumor-promoting (M2) macrophages. Both cell types are immunosuppressive, collectively contributing to the barrier against T cell attack. By contrast, FMRP-KO cancer cells down-regulate all three factors and up-regulate C-C motif chemokine ligand 7 (CCL7), which helps recruit and activate T cells. Additionally, immunostimulatory macrophages develop in this context that express three proinflammatory chemokines—CCL5, CXCL9, and CXCL10—which cooperate with CCL7 in recruiting T cells. Finally, neither FMR1 mRNA nor FMRP protein levels were sufficient to predict outcomes in cohorts of cancer patients. Recognizing FMRP’s function as an RNA binding protein that modulates mRNA stability and hence levels in transcriptome datasets, a gene signature reflecting FMRP’s cancer regulatory activity (involving 156 genes) was developed by comparing FMRP-expressing versus FMRP-deficient cancer cells, both in culture and within tumors. Our FMRP cancer activity signature was prognostic for survival across multiple human cancers; anticorrelated with the intensity of T cell infiltration in different tumor types, consistent with FMRP’s immunosuppressive effects; and was associated with comparatively poor responses to immune checkpoint inhibitors and immune-dependent chemotherapy in selected cohorts.

FMRP is revealed as a regulator of a network of genes and cells in the tumor microenvironment that contribute to the capability of tumors to evade immune destruction.

Abstract

Many human cancers manifest the capability to circumvent attack by the adaptive immune system. In this work, we identified a component of immune evasion that involves frequent up-regulation of fragile X mental retardation protein (FMRP) in solid tumors. FMRP represses immune attack, as revealed by cancer cells engineered to lack its expression. FMRP-deficient tumors were infiltrated by activated T cells that impaired tumor growth and enhanced survival in mice. Mechanistically, FMRP’s immunosuppression was multifactorial, involving repression of the chemoattractant C-C motif chemokine ligand 7 (CCL7) concomitant with up-regulation of three immunomodulators—interleukin-33 (IL-33), tumor-secreted protein S (PROS1), and extracellular vesicles. Gene signatures associate FMRP’s cancer network with poor prognosis and response to therapy in cancer patients. Collectively, FMRP is implicated as a regulator that orchestrates a multifaceted barrier to antitumor immune responses.