Research Focus | Lab Achievements | Funding

Research Focus

Our primary focus is on developing targeted therapeutics for cancer. We approach this goal through three major efforts:

1. Engineering protein drugs to interrogate complex immunoregulatory pathways. Using directed evolution, we develop immune cytokines, immunoreceptors, and antibodies. We apply these drugs in preclinical cancer models and advance them into clinical trials. Read about our work on developing decoy-resistant IL-18.
2. Decoding the autoantibody “reactome” to find natural immune drugs- patient autoantibodies- that highlight novel therapeutic targets from “clinical trials of nature.” These studies leverage a powerful autoantibody discovery platform called REAP that the lab developed. We use REAP to perform the first-ever autoantibody-wide association studies across diverse disease indications ranging from cancer to autoimmunity, neurodegeneration, and infectious disease. Read about our work on autoantibodies.
3. Discovery of novel tumor antigens for the next generation of targeted cancer therapeutics. A major unmet need in oncology is that there simply are not enough tumor-selective targets for most types of cancer. We are developing new approaches and platforms for pinpointing targets to direct CAR-T cells, bispecific antibodies, and antibody drug conjugates. This includes new technologies in proteogenomics and high-throughput functional screening of tumor-reactive antibodies.

Lab Achievements

Therapeutics that are currently in clinical trials include:

• ST-067 (a "decoy-resistant" IL-18) 
• MDNA-11 (CD122-biased IL-2)
• ALX-148/evorpacept (an ultra-high affinity SΙRPα decoy)

Technology Platforms

• REAP platform for discovering autoantibodies in patient samples
• BASEHIT technique to detect host: microbe interactions

Spin-out companies

• Simcha Therapeutics
• Seranova Bio
• Stipple Bio
• ALX Oncology
• Ab Initio Biotherapeutics

Funding

We are grateful to receive support from the following organizations.