Bio-X SIGF Graduate Student Fellow

Awarded in 2019
Home Department: Bioengineering
Faculty Advisors: John Sunwoo (Otolaryngology - Head & Neck Surgery) and Garry Nolan (Microbiology & Immunology)

Research Title: High-Dimensional Profiling of Novel Innate Lymphoid Cells to Determine Their Function and Immunotherapeutic Potential

Research Description: Natural killer (NK) cells are innatePhoto of graduate student Nina Horowitz in a wet lab, wearing glasses and a lab coat and gloves, putting a sample into a centrifuge. lymphoid cells (ILCs) that kill tumor cells and activate other cells to enhance adaptive antitumor immune responses. The Sunwoo lab has recently discovered novel intratumoral NK-like ILCs, but potential differences in their function are unknown because current assays are limited in scope. Nina will be engineering two multiplexed technologies in collaboration with the Nolan lab to profile the phenotypes and behavior of intratumoral ILCs, while also analyzing the activation state of these cells in cancer patients undergoing a specific therapy, to begin determining the ILCs’ therapeutic potential.

WHERE IS SHE NOW?

Nina is the Head of Research - NK Therapeutics at ImmuneBridge, a start-up with the unique capacity to expand stem cells from cord blood for inexpensive manufacturing of cancer immunotherapies.