Ishizuka Lab

Laboratory Goals

Innate immune signaling in the tumor microenvironment has emerged as a critical determinant of anti-tumor immunity. However, the fundamental mechanisms and effects of tumor innate immunity and inflammation are poorly understood. The mission of the lab is to define and target the biology of tumor inflammation and innate immunity. We seek to achieve this overarching goal through three core activities:

i) Build a suite of technologies and reagents to dissect tumor-intrinsic and tumor microenvironment-associated inflammation

ii) Delineate the regulatory biology and rules of tumor and innate immune inflammatory processes

iii) Identify new therapeutic approaches that leverage these insights to improve cancer immunotherapy

Approaches

We utilize a wide range of in silico, in vitro and in vivo techniques. However, the core competencies of the lab include basic and systems immunology, functional genomics, multimodal tumor microenvironment assessment and in vivo models of immunotherapy efficacy.

Areas of focus

We are working on novel strategies to manipulate inflammation within the tumor microenvironment in order to improve cancer therapy. These approaches build off of our prior work demonstrating that targeting the innate checkpoints in tumors including dsRNA sensing can trigger components of the anti-viral response and overcome resistance to immune checkpoint blockade. We are also developing approaches to improve the interrogation of the tumor-immune microenvironment from patient samples.