Jeffrey Ishizuka, MD, DPhil

We study the mechanisms by which tumors activate and evade the host immune response with the goals of discovering new treatment approaches for cancer patients and advancing of our fundamental understanding of tumor immunobiology.

We are work on novel strategies to manipulate the initiation and effects of inflammation within the tumor microenvironment in order to improve cancer immunotherapy. Areas of focus include the triggering of dsRNA sesning pathways to improve the recruitment and activation of anti-tumor immune cells, identification of novel drug targets for combination immunotherapy and the development of improved approaches to characterizing the tumor-immune microenvironment in patient samples. Our projects build off of our prior work demonstrating that targeting the innate checkpoints in tumors can trigger components of the anti-viral response and overcome resistance to immune checkpoint blockade. To achieve our aims, we utilize a wide variety of in vitro, in vivo and in silico techniques, with core competencies in basic and systems immunology, functional genomics, multimodal tumor microenvironment assessment and in vivo models of immunotherapy efficacy.

Anti-tumor immunity; Tumor environment; Anti-viral immunity