THE QUESTION
Diseases like cancer are heterogeneous, complicating how we understand them and, therefore, their treatment. Immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment, but many patients still face little or no clinical benefit with the same treatment. Recent high-dimensional technologies have allowed us to understand the tissue ecosystem and its impact on treatment response. We are motivated by the questions of how the tissue microenvironment changes upon disease progression, before and after treatment, and if we can predict treatment responses based on blood immune cell signatures, with a special focus on neutrophils. A strong focus of the lab is characterizing and understanding neutrophils in the wound-healing context & anti-tumoral neutrophil phenotypes induced by different immunotherapy modalities. We wish to identify severe human burn trauma biomarkers by looking at human samples and model organisms like zebrafish and mice. We also wish to compare neutrophils with cancers, the wounds that do not heal.
THE APPROACH
We follow where science takes us. Currently, we leverage computational biology approaches, using high-dimensional data from multi-omics genome-wide (genomics and epigenomics) and single-cell assays, data mining, and bioinformatics. We develop and employ computational biology methods to mine publicly available data and in-house generated data for the specific questions we ask. We validate what we found in human data using independent data cohorts, in vitro, and in vivo approaches.
Ultimately, we aim to understand how the immune tissue microenvironment changes toward finding immunotherapeutic biomarkers and targets.
Although our central questions focus on the biomedical context, we are open to the collaborative environment in Madison to explore similar questions in other exciting areas.
Lab News
Josh defended his thesis! Congratulations, Dr. Brand!
Josh delivered an outstanding thesis defense and will head to Boston for an industry postdoctoral position at Visterra, Inc. We wish Dr. Brand all success in this next endeavor!
July 3, 2025Spatial RNA-Seq analysis showed proof-of-concept study of burn wound microenvironment published in WRR
In collaboration with the Angela Gibson lab, an analysis led by Parth showed “the capability of spatial transcriptomics to detect spatial gene expression patterns in burn tissue. Specifically, we show that (i) spatially variable expressed …
June 30, 2025Athena defended her thesis! Congratulations Dr. Golfinos-Owens!
Athena will be heading to AbbVie as a senior data scientist. Congratulations, and we are rooting for your future success!
May 29, 2025Lab Presentations at AACR – Chicago 2025
Anqi presented her poster identifying potential anti-tumoral neutrophil phenotypes using scRNA-Seq for Head and Neck cancer mouse models across different immunotherapies. Josh presented his poster evaluating immune response phenotypes for combined radiation and immune checkpoint …
May 3, 2025Graduate student Athena won AACR scholar-in-training award for her abstract in characterizing vulvar tumor microenvironment!
This is Athena’s 2nd AACR award, congratulations!
April 24, 2025- More News