Medical School
Twin Cities
This research focuses on understanding immune cell metabolism during graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) and in T cells during anti-cancer immune responses. GVHD is the major complication following allogeneic blood and marrow transplantation (BMT) and the primary obstacle to making this curative therapy more widely available.
A combination of understanding GVHD and stem cell transplantation on a cellular level and understanding techniques from the field of cellular metabolism provides a novel and innovative way to investigate cells responsible for post-transplant immune reconstitution and disease pathogenesis. More recently, this laboratory has begun to investigate metabolic modulation as a way to improve the function of cancer-targeting T cells. The researchers not only understand the clinical challenges of BMT and caveats of adoptive cellular therapies, but also dig deeper into the fundamental immunology of these procedures to help develop the next generation of interventions against cancer and transplant-related complications.