Research Teams

Andrea Facciabene, PhD

Andrea Facciabene, PhD

 Dr. Andrea Facciabene’s laboratory website

Dr. Andrea Facciabene's lab is focused on immunotherapy and investigation of the network of immune responses to tumors, combining basic research and clinical investigation. The gut microbiome is increasingly recognized as a major player in both malignant progression and response to treatment. The Facciabene lab aims to advance the understanding of this new player and Bridging Radiation Therapy in the context of the CAR T cell approach and to implement the new findings to improve the anti-tumor effects of cellular therapies. 

Daniel Powell Jr., PhD

Daniel Powell Jr., PhD

 Powell Laboratory website

Dr. Daniel Powell's research explores the role of T cell response in the control of human cancer, focusing on ovarian cancer, and the application of adoptive lymphocyte immunotherapy, immunomodulation and cancer vaccination. Dr. Powell is the Scientific Director of Immunotherapy in the Division of Gynecologic Oncology, and is actively working to develop clinical trials of CAR T cell therapy for ovarian cancer. While at the National Cancer Institute, he developed combinatorial approaches for tumor vaccination, investigated the role of immunosuppressive regulatory T cells in cancer, and successfully applied adoptive T cell immunotherapy for the treatment of patients with metastatic melanoma.

Lin Zhang, M.D.

Lin Zhang, M.D.

 Full profile

Dr. Lin Zhang’s research focuses on the characterization of molecular mechanisms and the development of novel therapies for cancer by  combining computational and molecular biology approaches. His team reported that long non-coding RNAs exhibit genomic alterations with high frequency in cancer and they developed novel strategies to target DNA repair pathways in combination with inhibition of certain long non-coding RNA or epigenetic regulators to treat breast and ovarian cancer. By integrating large-scale and multi-dimensional genomic profiles, his lab developed a Functional Cancer Genome data portal (FCG data portal: http://52.25.87.215/home/) to functionally annotate TCGA genomic profiles. Examples include annotations on the relationship between genetic ancestry and genomic alteration (Cancer Cell 2018) and genomic alterations in epigenetic regulatory genes (Nature Communications 2019, and Cell Reports 2022). Our early and still ongoing research is directed towards investigating the antitumor immune response and developing immunotherapy strategies for ovarian cancer. Our studies provided strong clinical evidence to support the concept of immune surveillance in ovarian cancer (New England Journal of Medicine 2003, and Nature Cancer 2021).