Graduate Program In Life Sciences (GPILS)

Our research combines immunology and biomaterials to i) understand the interactions between synthetic materials and immune tissues, and ii) to design more selective therapeutic vaccines for cancer and autoimmunity. This presentation will highlight our most recent efforts toward these goals using materials science tools, primary cell culture, animal models, and samples from human patients. Recent studies confirm many biomaterials exhibit intrinsic physiochemical features that activate, suppress, or modulate immune pathways, even in the absence of other immune signals. I will discuss our work to characterize how these immunological interactions change as common polymeric vaccine carriers degrade in immune cells and in lymph nodes - tissues that coordinate immune response. Understanding how the immunological profile of biomaterials evolves during delivery could enable design of carriers that also help actively direct immune response. Toward this goal, I will highlight our lab's efforts to self-assemble immune signals into modular nanostructures. This approach allows programmable activation of the combination and relative levels of immune pathways triggered by these constructs. Controlling these pathways could improve the efficacy and efficiency of new immunotherapies. Last, I will discuss our work to understand how the local concentrations of drugs in lymph nodes impacts the development of immune cells expanding and differentiation in these sites. In particular, our data reveal that different types of T cell responses – effector, memory, regulatory – can be produced against the same antigen by locally altering metabolism in lymph nodes during T cell expansion. As translational examples, I will discuss our work to exploit this idea using immune-modulatory small molecules to enhance responses for cancer vaccination, or conversely, to combat autoimmunity by regulating T cell function.