kitchen countertopsIn Hanahan, SC

MOUNT PLEASANT — It took the Hanahan High offense more than a half to get going against undefeated Lucy Beckham, and even then there wasn’t much offense to speak of.

However, the Hawks made two drives count in the second half, getting their only touchdown and a field goal to win 10-6 at District 2 Stadium on Sept. 9.

Hanahan improves to 2-0 on the season, using a dominant run game to wear down the Bengals.

“Man, this was a physical football game and I thought both teams played really hard,” Hanahan coach Art Craig said. “This is what a playoff game is like. Both teams going at it on every play. Every little mistake is crucial.

“I am really proud of this football team. I mean, this was our second game. We are still in the process of putting things together. So this is a great win for us. Lucy Beckham is a very good football team.”

Junior running back Kevon Rivera, a third-year starter and one of the top backs in the Lowcountry, overcame a sluggish start to shoulder the load in the decisive second half. Rivera finished the night with over 100 yards rushing, the bulk coming in the final two quarters of play.

Fairly significant pre-game rain eased up by kickoff, setting the stage for a rather uneventful first half. The lone points of the half came on Jack Weil’s 42-yard field goal, capping Lucy Beckham’s best drive of the opening half.

Hanahan struggled to get any consistent offense going against an aggressive Bengals’ defense. The Hawks ran one offensive play in Lucy Beckham territory, that coming after a Nathaniel Parson interception. On the next play, Hanahan fumbled and Bengals’ linebacker Hank Aeppli recovered.

It took just two plays of the third quarter for the Hawks to enter Lucy Beckham territory. Ashton Drayton and Rivera combined for 27 yards on successive carries to give Hanahan a first down at the Bengals’ 46-yard line.

Rivera ripped off 11 yards on third-and-one to put the Hawks on the Lucy Beckham 26-yard line. Later on the drive, on fourth-and-three from the 19, Rivera gained the first down by inches. Quarterback Jaden Cummings capped the 15-play drive with a one-yard sneak, giving the Hawks a 7-3 lead with 3:57 left in the third quarter.

“That was a huge drive for us because we really needed to come out establish the fact that we were here and we were gonna play,” Craig said. “I went to Kevon and told him we needed more from him. In that second half, he showed why he is one of the best around.”

Weil added a second field goal, a 35-yarder, to close the gap to 7-6 with 10:22 left in the game.

But the Hawks had an answer, a long answer. Hanahan again put together a 15-play drive that ate up nearly eight minutes with Eric Johnson kicking an 18-yard field goal for a 10-6 lead with 2:29 left in the game.

“You know, we played hard tonight but we didn’t play great,” Bengals head coach Jamel Smith said. “Effort was good, Fundamentals, tackling, not so good. Hopefully we learned a lot tonight. Hopefully these kids understand when we talk about tackling, this is what we mean. Good job by Hanahan though. We didn’t slow them much in the second half.”

The Bengals will play at Stall next Friday while Hanahan will go to Timberland in a Berkeley County rivalry. Craig is the former head coach at Timberland.

After being reelected for another term on Tuesday, Hanahan Mayor Christie Rainwater is already preparing for the next four years.

HANAHAN, S.C. (WCSC) - After being reelected for another term on Tuesday, Hanahan Mayor Christie Rainwater is already preparing for the next four years.

In this year’s election, no opponents ran against Rainwater, which she says was a relief to not sit on the edge of her seat and worry about winning or not.

“I feel like the residents of the city have seen the work I’ve put in, and they want that to keep going,” she says. “They want the momentum to continue, and no one ran against me. I’m able to really continue keeping that momentum going.”

The Hanahan City Council and school board members were all reelected on Tuesday, and the mayor says will continue as a strong partnership because of the established relationships.

Similar to the rest of the Lowcountry, Hanahan continues to grow. Rainwater focused on building economic development and recreation in the area by adding two new parks over the last four years.

“Really bringing this quality of life to the residents is what we’ve been doing over the past four years and will continue to do over the next four,” she says.

As for the upcoming four years, the mayor really wants to focus on flooding concerns, more economic growth and additional housing for the community. She also mentioned that the Lowcountry Rapid Transit plans include four stops that will positively impact Hanahan.

“We are really looking at our specifically downtown area and how can we allow for housing that will work for everyone,” Rainwater says. “We have changed the ordinances over the past few years that will allow for us to build up a little higher and bring that in.”

The mayor also expressed that Hanahan has a small-town feel despite being the seventeenth-largest city in South Carolina.

“I like to say I bleed blue and orange,” she says. “Hanahan is the heart of the Lowcountry. When you look at its location, you’ve got downtown Charleston, Summerville, Mount Pleasant, West Ashley, and right in the heart, you’ll find Hanahan. The truth is, it’s not just because of its location; the people in Hanahan are so special.”

Copyright 2022 WCSC. All rights reserved.

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.

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.

One Hanahan resident is doing all he can to save his Palmetto tree after receiving a notice from Dominion Energy that it’s been scheduled to be cut down.

HANAHAN, S.C. (WCSC) - One Hanahan resident is doing all he can to save his Palmetto tree after receiving a notice from Dominion Energy that it’s been scheduled to be cut down.

Jay Mullis says after returning home recently he found his tree marked with an “X” and a note in his driveway from Dominion stating the condition of his tree warrants action by the company.

The Mullis family has lived in this home since December of 2019, and they say the palmetto is the most important piece of their front lawn.

Mullis contacted a Dominion representative and shared his concern about the sudden notice that the tree was a threat and was looking to find a mutually beneficial compromise.

Dominion Energy said the tree has made contact with their energized distribution conductors and has been identified as hazardous.

After being told there wasn’t anything the company could do to save the tree, Mullis took it into his own hands. He has since trimmed it in hopes that it will no longer pose a threat momentarily and can give him time to move the tree on his own dime.

Dominion Energy spokesman Paul Fischer warned that customers should never hire a private contractor to work near power lines or attempt to do the work themselves.

“Untrained individuals should not attempt to trim trees near overhead lines for risk of serious or fatal injury,” he said. “Only qualified utility line clearance professionals or contractors who meet OSHA qualifications are legally permitted to work within 10 feet of power lines, or work on a tree that has branches within 10 feet of power lines.”

“I think it’s important that we start working together on these issues, it’s a piece of me that we cut and the tree I think will be fine and hope that they just let me move it back 10 feet,” Mullis says.

To purchase a new tree would cost thousands and Mullis says it would take years to grow to the size of his current one. He says all he’s looking for is a chance to work with Dominion to save his tree.

Dominion says customers with concerns regarding trees on or near their property should call (800) 251-7234.

Copyright 2022 WCSC. All rights reserved.