Assistant Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School

Clinicn Investigator, Asst Prf KFCCR Faculty, Mass General Research Institute

Assistant In Medicine Medicine-Hematology/Oncology, Massachusetts General Hospital

MD Medical University of South Carolina 2012

3d cell cultures; acute; cancer immunotherapy; ceramides; chin; immunotherapy; leukemia monocytic; lysosomes; organotypic tumor spheroids; sphingolipids; sphingomyelin phosphodiesterase; sphingosine; tumor microenvironment

Immunotherapy has transformed the treatment of metastatic melanoma and other cancers, allowing a new avenue of therapeutic options and prolonging lives of many patients. Unfortunately, while immunotherapy is highly effective in some patients, it does not work for every patient and there are no available tests to determine whether or not a patient will respond to immunotherapy before treatment begins.

To understand why immunotherapy works for some patients and not others, the Jenkins laboratory uses sophisticated tools and techniques to study and investigate the complex and dynamic interactions between cancer cells and the immune system.

Our solution to this problem involves a specialized 3-dimensional culture of a patient's own tumor enabling researchers to examine interactions between tumor cells and immune cells.

The integration of this novel approach with other emerging technologies is helping us navigate the complex landscape of the tumor immune microenvironment and learn which patients will respond to immunotherapy as well as how to effectively treat cancer patients that do not respond immunotherapy alone.