Kathleen Sheehan
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology
Immunotherapies treat cancer by turning a patient's own immune system against the disease. To know whether a treatment works, and why, researchers must measure in detail how patients' immune cells change.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
immunomonitoring
cancer immunotherapy
tumor immunology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Monitor how specific immunotherapies change patients' immune profiles, using flow cytometry, CyTOF mass cytometry and multiplex functional assays to support clinical trials.
- Map the spatial arrangement of immune, stromal and tumor cells in tissue sections, using Hyperion imaging mass cytometry and CODEX to detect more than 40 markers each.
- Develop MHC class II tetramers, labeled molecules that track and count antigen-specific CD4 T cells in response to immunotherapy, and harmonize tetramer staining across institutions.
- Track developing immune responses to new therapies in animal models of cancer to inform therapeutic strategies and translational studies.
More about the research
The Immunomonitoring Laboratory (IML) is a shared facility in the Bursky Center for Human Immunology and Immunotherapy Programs. It provides the instruments and expertise to do this for Washington University, Siteman Cancer Center and Barnes-Jewish Hospital clinicians and scientists, including ongoing clinical trials.
Why it matters
Detailed immune profiling of patients and animal models helps show whether cancer immunotherapies are working and how. Spatial maps of tumors and new tools for tracking helper T cells could help researchers design more targeted treatment strategies and evaluate outcomes in clinical trials for cancer patients.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Zoran Galic
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Provide cancer center investigators with flow cytometry, mass cytometry, imaging cytometry and cell sorting services using instruments such as the Helios mass cytometer, ImageStream imaging cytometer and Aria high-speed sorters.
Karen Creswell
Georgetown University, DC·Microbiology & Immunology
Provide flow cytometry analysis and cell sorting to cancer center members at two sites, sorting cells by transfection markers, stem cell panels and surface or internal markers for functional and molecular follow-up studies.
Lyndsey Muehling
University of Virginia, VA·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Identify pre-existing immune signatures that predict respiratory viral infection severity, using samples from a completed human model of repeated rhinovirus challenge together with a cohort of well-characterized allergic asthma patients.
The school
Washington University in St Louis: 97 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 365 research doctorates a year.
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