Many diseases could be cured if the power of our own immune systems could be harnessed. For cancer, the theory of "cancer immunoediting" provides a hypothesis for how tumors escape detection by the immune system.
Dr. Jiang, a biomedical engineer, works at the interface of systems biology, genomics, and immunology. Her lab is developing a single cell-based integrated technological approach to challenge this theory. She will profile the immune system repertoire for antigen specificity, receptor gene sequences, and cellular function-related gene expression. Her approach may provide explanations for why and how the immune system tolerates tumors. Her proposed study may result in a paradigm shift that could improve cancer immunotherapies and also revolutionize health care with new personalized immune metrics for early disease detection and targeted therapy.