Timour Baslan, PhD

Our immune cells help us fight injections, for example, the flu. Our immune cells also help our bodies fight cancer cells. Famous studies by Drs. Allison and Honjo, where they did experiments by injecting cancer cells into mice to study how the immune system fights cancer discovered “ways” cancer cells use to hide from immune cells. Those discoveries were then used to make drugs that “wake-up” the immune system; those drugs are known as immunotherapies. But these drugs don’t work for all patients. This means there are other “ways” cancer cells hide from our immune system. Our goal is to discover these other ways, but not by using cancer cells. Instead, we are doing experiments using unique and special cells that are not cancer yet, but on their way to becoming cancer. We call them “pre-malignant” cells (pre-malignant = pre-cancer). By using these unusual and novel cells, we want to discover new ways that cancer cells use to escape from the immune system and to make drugs that reverse this, so we can develop the next generation of immunotherapies.