Apprentice cancer immunologist

Immune checkpoint system stands for the inhibitory receptors that appear on our immune cells (and their ligands on normal tissue cells) that work as "immunological brakes". In physiological condition, such mechanism ensures that the functions of immune cells will get buffered and thus will not impair normal cells surrounding them. The best-known inhibitory receptors are Program Death-1 (PD-1) and Cytotoxic-T lymphocyte-associated protein 4 (CTLA-4) that are expressed on most immune cell types. However, when it comes to cancer condition, immune checkpoints can also be hijacked by cancer cells to protect themselves from immune surveillance. Notably, some cancer cells highly express the ligands of these inhibitory receptors. So imagine in optimal condition, a immune cell can recognize a tumor cell, get activated and can eventually kill it. But when cancer cells trigger the inhibitory pathways of immune cells by directly binding to the PD-1 and CTLA-4 receptors on them, can...

Here is some background knowledge about the retreat I went to this Monday& Tuesday. The Starr Cancer Consortium (SCC) was established in 2006 through a generous gift from The Starr Foundation to advance research in new ways that will have an impact on the understanding, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of cancer. Basically the retreat is like an annual summary of cancer discovery presented by the funded dream team- The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, The Rockefeller University, and Weill Cornell Medical College. As we can imagine, there were full of exciting findings, many of which were achieved by teamwork among the top institutes. Lots of efforts were made on functional genomics (we now don't start with one oncogene/tumor suppressor gene, we lay out the whole genome profiling of the patients.). Remember the big news about movie star Angelina Jolie who received a surgery to remove both of her b...

I was so shocked to hear the sudden death of Dr. Alan Hall, the chair of Cell Biology Program of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and a truly great scientist. It was such an unexpected heart attack that left everyone in a great sorrow this week. Alan is such a fantastic scientist that has made tremendous contribution to the field of cell biology, cytoskeleton( bone structure of a cell) in particular. He is also a kind and inspiring mentor in our mind... The institute had a rather short memorial this Thursday and we will be having a more formal one later when his family get back from UK (his hometown).  Even to people outside the cytoskeleton field, the contribution that Dr. Hall has made is so important that it provides basis of many of the discoveries that were made in the past 20 years. The cytoskeleton, as the supporting structure of cells, functions to maintain the shape and motion of cells. As such dynamic structure, the mechanisms of it has always been i...

Despite being told all the time that the our research is eventually going to help with the clinics, I actually used to not buy it. Especially before I joined my current lab in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) and before I really worked on clinically related research projects, I always thought that there was a huge gap between lab and hospital. However recently I started to realize that the gap is actually shrinking so much faster than I could have ever imagined. The MSKCC lab building and Memorial Hospital Building is side by side, and thus sharing of results from lab bench with clinics could never be faster. I want to share two real life stories here that I actually recently experienced. A friend of mine introduced me to a oncology surgeon from China this week. He will spend a year here in a MSKCC lab learning research. He shared with me an interesting question the lab was that he was going to work on which was truly based on clinical findings. One of the newest canc...