Section of Cell and Developmental Biology
Division of Biological Sciences
University of California, San Diego
News
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04/05/2022 Ola has be admitted to the PhD program of UC-Berkeley! Congratulations!
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11/04/2021 Xiaozheng and Takeya's preprint is now published on eLife! Terrific teamwork!
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09/28/2021 Jibin Zhang has joined our group as a PhD student. Welcome!
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06/15/2021 Isaac Chang has joined the lab at a research assistant. Welcome!
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06/04/2021 Jennifer has completed an honor thesis and she will pursue her PhD at Yale! Congrats!
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05/10/2021 Enfu has been granted tenure and promotion to Associate Professor! Congrats!
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04/15/2021 Ola Mostafa has joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome!
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04/15/2021 Ya-yuan Chan has joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome!
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03/04/2021 Congratulations to Jibin for his admission to the PhD program of UCSD Division of Biological Sciences!
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07/29/2020 Takeya's co-1st author paper is now published on Cell. Great colla. w/ Chenqi Xu and Catherine Wong!
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07/05/2020 Scott has completed an honor thesis and graduated from UCSD with Magna Cum Laude!
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05/21/2020 Xiaozheng's preprint has been published on Journal of Cell Biology. Congrats!
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05/16/2020 Yanzhe has been accepted by the graduate program of Columbia University! Congrats!
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03/15/2020 Preston Dennett has joined the lab as a PhD student. Welcome!
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01/02/2020 Jibin has joined the lab as an research intern. Welcome!
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11/05/2019 Yunlong's paper has been been accepted by Immunity. Congrats!
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08/12/2019 Enfu's review article is published on Immunological Reviews!
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08/01/2019 Chloe has joined the lab as an lab assistant. Welcome!
Mechanistic dissection of cancer immunotherapy targets
We work at at the interface of biochemistry, cell biology, and immunology. Our central goal is to dissect the cell biological mechanisms of immune checkpoints, "brakes" of our immune system that can be hijacked by tumors to evade immune destruction. Antibody mediated blockade of immune checkpoints has produced some success in treating a subset of tumors in a fraction of patients. However the response is restricted to a small subset of tumors and patients. Molecular studies of immune checkpoints are needed to expand the therapy to a larger population of patients. Our long-term goal is to fill this mechanistic gap, with a joint use of cell-free reconstitution, live cell imaging and cell culture assays.
Image by Graham Johnson
Cell free reconstitution: We reconstitute signaling networks on model membranes to gain quantitative, in-depth insights into T cell signaling that are invisible to traditional approaches.
Signaling dynamics: We probe the spatiotemporal dynamics of signaling proteins in live T cells.
Cell cultures: We develop precise and robust cell culture assays to probe both proximal and distal readouts of immune checkpoints signaling.
Mouse models: We cross-check our findings between in vitro systems and animal models.
