THE QUESTION
Cancer is a heterogeneous disease that complicates its study and therefore treatment. Immunotherapy has revolutionized cancer treatment but many patients still are facing with little or no clinical benefit with the same treatment. Recent high-dimensional technologies have allowed us the ability to understand the tumor ecosystem and its impact on treatment response. We are motivated by the questions of how the tumor microenvironment changes upon cancer progression, before and after treatment, and if we can predict treatment responses based on blood immune cell signatures.
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 cohort, in vitro and in vivo approaches.
Ultimately, our goal is to understand how tumor immune microenvironment changes toward finding immunotherapeutic biomarkers and targets.
Although our central questions focus on cancer, we are open to the collaborative environment in Madison to explore similar questions in other diseases.
Lab News
Our joint paper with the Lambert lab defining single-cell immune landscape of head and neck murine models published in Clinical Cancer Research
Together with Paul Lambert’s lab, we identified the roles of K17 contribution in HNC immunotherapy and the immune landscape switch from “cold tumors” to “hot tumors” using scRNA-Seq. The work was led by Wei Wang …
May 27, 2022Lab conference presentations – Spring 2022
Congratulations on the lab presentations in Spring 2022. Athena won the 2022 AACR Scholar-in-training award to present at the annual AACR meeting in New Orleans, LA in April 2022. Josh won the 2022 AAI Trainee …
May 23, 2022Our collaborative paper in scRNA-Seq of EBV lines published in PLoS Pathogens
Our collaborative work with Shannon Kenney’s lab used scRNA-Seq to identify the roles of IRF4 in type 2 EBV lytic induction was out in PloS Pathogens. Josh is the 2nd author leading the scRNA-Seq analysis. …
May 1, 2022Lab personnel update – Spring 2022
Aisha left for a Study Director position in Covance. She will lead the preclinical study there. Congrats and Best wishes for the new job! Wanyi Guo and Xindi Tang joined the lab as undergraduate researchers …
February 12, 2022Our scRNA-Seq analysis of esophageal cancers is published in Nature Communications
In collaboration with Dr. Dechen Lin’s lab at Cedars Sinai Medical Center and scientists from the Shantou University Medical College, we used scRNA-Seq to characterize the tumor microenvironment of esophageal squamous carcinoma and identified CST1+ …
December 28, 2021- More News