Section of Cell and Developmental Biology
Division of Biological Sciences
University of California, San Diego
News
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02/09/2023 Ioanna Andritsogianni joined our group as a research assistant. Welcome!
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01/26/2023 Welcome our new lab assistant Alexandra Hotz!
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10/13/2022 Takeya has received the PRESTO Award from the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST). Congrats!
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09/15/2022 Xiaozheng has accepted a Senior Principal Scientist position at Sanofi. He'll start his own lab soon. Congrats!
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08/31/2022 Preston successfully defended his PhD thesis today! Congrats Dr. Dennett!
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08/05/2022 Yunlong has received a K99/R00 Award from NIAID! Congrats!
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06/28/2022 High school student Emily Yu has joined the lab as a research intern. Welcome!
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06/19/2022 High school students Elinor Silva and Hyerim Kim have started a summer internship with us. Welcome!
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06/10/2022 Isaac has graduated from UCSD with Magna Cum Laude! He has now become a Master's student with us. Congrats!
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05/06/2022 Yufei Liu has joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome!
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04/28/2022 Takeya's collaboration with Neal Devaraj's lab has led to a paper on ACS Chemical Biology! Congrats!
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04/15/2022 Ariane Yu has joined the lab as a research assistant. Welcome!
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04/05/2022 Ola has been admitted to the PhD program of UC-Berkeley! Congrats!
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03/08/2022 Xiaozheng's co-1st author paper is now published on Immunity! Great colla. w/ Ira Mellman!
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11/04/2021 Xiaozheng and Takeya's co-1st author paper 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 as 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!
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.
