We developed a method for generating dendritic cell progenitors (DCPs) from hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells isolated from bone marrow or blood. When engineered to express IL-12 and FLT3L, these DCPs reprogram the tumor microenvironment and elicit a ...
Communication between the intestine and other organs such as the lungs, brain or bones is mediated by several metabolites, like short-chain fatty acids or bile acids, that relay information about nutritional and microbiota status. Bile acids are endogenous ...
Elevated peripheral blood and tumor-infiltrating neutrophils are often associated with a poor patient prognosis. However, therapeutic strategies to target these cells are difficult to implement due to the life-threatening risk of neutropenia. In a genetica ...
The advent of immunotherapy, such as immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) and adoptive transfer of cytotoxic lymphocytes, has transformed the clinical care of cancer. However, a significant proportion of patients are resistant to immunotherapy or experience re ...
Dendritic cells (DCs) are specialized myeloid cells with the ability to uptake, process, and
present antigens to T lymphocytes. They also generate cytokine and chemokine gradients that
regulate immune cell trafficking, activation, and function. Monocyte-de ...
Background Excessive inflammation, hemolysis, and accumulation of labile heme play an essential role in the pathophysiology of multi-organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS) in sepsis. Alpha1-antitrypsin (AAT), an acute phase protein with heme binding capacity, i ...
CAR-T cell therapy has shown remarkable success in treating hematopoietic malignancies, but its efficacy in solid tumors is limited by T cell dysfunction, including exhaustion and senescence. In this study, we designed metabolically armored CAR-T cells to ...
Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death worldwide. Early-stage disease can be detected with preventative medical screening and is treatable with surgical resection. Sixty-percent of patients, however, are diagnosed with advanced-stage ...
Acute leukemia has a high mortality rate of approximately 50%, and current methods are not effective in predicting disease progression and relapse. To improve our understanding of hematopoiesis and develop new markers for predicting disease relapse in dead ...
Cancer immunotherapy has become an attractive strategy among different therapeutic modalities over the past few years and has showed great success in the clinic. However, there are many outstanding challenges hindering the current immunotherapies. In my Ph ...
OBJECTIVE: Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a rare disease that has a poor response to conventional therapy. Hyperthermic intrathoracic chemotherapy (HITOC), a treatment combining fever-range hyperthermia with intrapleural cisplatin chemotherapy, ha ...
Self-renewal and differentiation of stem and progenitor cells are tightly regulated to ensure tissue homeostasis. This regulation is enabled both remotely by systemic circulating cues, such as cytokines and hormones, and locally by various niche-confined f ...
Defining the ontogeny of tumor-associated macrophages (TAM) is important to develop therapeutic targets for mesothelioma. We identified two distinct macrophage populations in mouse peritoneal and pleural cavities, the monocyte-derived, small peritoneal/ple ...
Lymphomas are a group of heterogeneous blood cancers that arise from lymphocytes. The two primary clinical classifications of lymphomas are Hodgkin's lymphoma (HL), and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (NHL). In particular, B-cell lymphoma refers to the malignancies ...
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most frequent and highly malignant form of brain cancer. New therapeutic regimens are urgently needed as GBM patients present with a minimal response to currently-approved therapies. The goal of this project is to identify new the ...
Immune checkpoint blockade (ICB) with antibodies has shown durable clinical responses in a wide range of cancer types, but the overall response rate is still limited. Other effective therapeutic modalities to increase the ICB response rates are urgently ne ...
Intracellular lipid droplets (LDs) can accumulate in response to inflammation, metabolic stresses, and other physiological/pathological processes. Herein, we investigated whether spike proteins of SARS-CoV-2 induce LDs in human peripheral blood mononuclear ...
The use of CAR technologies has revolutionized cancer treatment. Their unprecedented efficacy against B cell malignancies has opened the doors for a lot of excitement and research in the field. These synthetic receptors are composed of an antigen recogniti ...
Recent breakthroughs in cancer immunotherapy, exemplified by immune checkpoint blockade and CAR T cell therapy, have achieved remarkable clinical success. However, the majority of cancer patients fail to respond to immunotherapy or suffer from relapse. Nan ...
Cell-cell communication is fundamental for immune balance. Multivalent interactions of surface receptors at immune interfaces drive specific communication, with stimulatory and inhibitory signals guiding the immune outcome. Notably, the valency, affinity, ...