News
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12/17/2025 Olivia Poell joined us as a 2nd year undergraduate. Welcome!
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12/16/2025 Keshav Gaddam joined us as a 2nd year undergraduate. Welcome!
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09/05/2025 Jibin received an F99 award from National Cancer Institute!
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05/19/2025 Kimberly Khow joined our lab. Welcome!
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05/08/2025 Katelyn Thai joined our lab. Welcome!
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02/24/2025 Eric Shao joined our lab. Welcome!
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01/03/2025 Takeya's paper published on Science Immunology!
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.
