NOTABLES
The Virus and Other Infection-associated Cancers Research Program is proud to welcome Ellen Foxman, MD, PhD, to its program. Dr. Foxman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and is studying innate immunity and host/virus interactions in the respiratory tract. Her laboratory focuses on signaling pathways in primary human airway epithelial cells. In recent work, her laboratory found an unexpected link between susceptibility to respiratory viruses and a pathway well-known to play an important role in oncogenesis and in evasion of chemotherapy by cancer cells: the NRF2 mediated oxidative stress response.
Dr. Foxman's future research directions include a more in-depth exploration of interplay between cell stress responses and epithelial immune defense, which she believes will provide new insights about oncogenesis in the airway and other epithelial tissues, and may also provide insights into how to counter evasion of epithelial cell immunosurveillance mechanisms to improve cancer therapy.