Welcome To The Jackson Lab

The focus of our lab’s research is at the intersection of immunology, metabolism, and brain tumor biology. The primary goal of our translational research is to understand mechanisms of immune evasion by primary malignant brain tumors and skull base tumors to generate novel immune-based therapies.

We utilize a combination of high-dimensional single cell immune and genomic profiling, metabolomics, and advanced tumor organoid and mouse models, to 1) understand the role of myeloid derived suppressor cells in promoting tumor growth and T cell dysfunction, 2) elucidate the mechanisms of tumor-specific T cell exhaustion and clonal lineage of dysfunction T cells, and 3) understand how metabolic networks control immune cell function within the tumor microenvironment.

Finally, our lab is uniquely integrated with the Penn Brain Tumor Center, as such, our lab is involved in evaluating immune responses in brain tumor patients undergoing immunotherapy with the goal of identifying predictors of response and new immune targets.