Jamie Spangler
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Biomedical Engineering·Early-career
The immune system can fight cancer and infection, but it can also attack the body's own tissues. Tumors often switch off T cells, the immune cells that kill cancer cells.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Microbiology & Immunology
Biochemistry
- Topics
protein engineering
antibody engineering
multispecific antibodies
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Discover and design multispecific down-regulating antibodies (MSDR Abs) that bind several sites on one immune checkpoint protein, clustering it and removing it from the T-cell surface.
- Use MSDR Abs to study how checkpoint proteins move inside cells, and test their effects on immune activity and on the mechanisms behind resistance to current checkpoint inhibitors.
- Test paired interleukin-2 (IL-2) immunocytokines, cytokines fused to anti-cytokine antibodies, that boost either effector cells or regulatory T cells, in animal models of cancer, inflammatory bowel disease and type 1 diabetes.
- Extend the cytokine-antibody fusion approach to IL-7 to promote T-cell survival, and build a blocking immunocytokine that targets a highly suppressive tumor-infiltrating Treg subset to boost anticancer immunity.
More about the research
They do this by engaging "checkpoint" proteins on the T-cell surface. Cytokines, the small signaling proteins that tune immune activity, could in principle push the immune system up or down as needed. In practice, they act on many cell types at once and break down quickly in the body. Across two projects, the lab engineers antibody-based proteins to steer the immune response more precisely. These proteins serve both as research tools and as possible therapies.
Why it matters
Many cancer patients do not respond to current checkpoint inhibitor drugs. Antibodies that remove checkpoint proteins from the T-cell surface could offer a different treatment route and help explain drug resistance. Engineered IL-2 and IL-7 immunocytokines could become ready-made medicines that boost immunity against cancer and infections. They could also calm it in autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease, or help transplanted organs be accepted.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mingnan Chen
University of Utah, UT·Pharmacology
Determine why a depleting anti-PD-1 antibody delays diabetes in early insulitis but accelerates it in late insulitis in NOD mice, profiling pancreatic islets and systemic immune cells by single-cell RNA sequencing and flow cytometry before and after treatment.
Booki Min
Northwestern University, IL·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how Lag3, an inhibitory surface co-receptor, lets Foxp3+ regulatory T cells suppress autoimmune neuroinflammation, using mice with the Lag3 outer domain, cytoplasmic tail or KIEELE motif deleted only in Tregs.
Guangyong Peng
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify how human Treg cells rewrite lipid metabolism and fate in responder T cells, focusing on the energy sensor AMPK, ATM DNA-damage signaling, and MAPK signaling.
The school
Johns Hopkins University: 100 labs on PI Pages, $4.1B a year on research, 622 research doctorates a year.
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