National Nanomedicine Seminar - "Local delivery of cancer immunotherapy: the example of cytokines"

Stephanie Dougan, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Microbiology and Immunobiology, Harvard Medical School 

Local delivery of cancer immunotherapy: the example of cytokines

In this lecture we will give an introduction to cancer immunotherapy, and a description of the challenges posed by cytokines as potential therapeutics. Options for local deliveries will be discussed including: nanoparticles, antibody/nanobody-cytokine fusions, engineered cytokines with altered binding properties, synthetic cytokine mimetics, and split proteins.

Stephanie Dougan received her PhD in immunology from Harvard University, where she studied lipid antigen presentation by CD1d and NKT cell development with Richard Blumberg. She then performed a postdoctoral fellowship with Hidde Ploegh at Whitehead Institute, where she became adept in somatic cell nuclear transfer and embryo manipulations for the purpose of generating transnuclear and CRISPR genome-modified mice. Dr. Dougan joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in 2014, where her lab uses unique mouse models to study the immune response to tumors. She is particularly interested in tumors that do not induce a CD8 T cell response at baseline, and has been using pancreatic cancer as a model to develop new immunotherapies for non-T cell infiltrated tumors.