Asaf Madi, PhD
Project Title
Improving Durable Response Rates Following Checkpoint Blockade Therapy
Named Grant:
Dr. Jerry Gross Memorial Research Career Development Award
About the Investigator:
Dr. Madi studies the molecular signaling that occurs in the tumor microenvironment in response to immunotherapy and immune cell interactions. He completed his Ph.D. studies at Tel Aviv University in collaboration with the Weizmann Institute of Science in Computational Immunology, where he studied B cell and T cell repertoires. Dr. Madi then continued to do a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women Hospital and the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Boston, USA where he mainly focused on the study of T-cell differentiation and cancer immunology. In 2018 he joined Tel Aviv University, where he is now an Assistant Professor at the Department of Pathology in the School of Medicine.
About the Research:
Anti-tumor immunotherapy enlists the patient’s own immune response to fight cancer. The immune response involves many different cell types, and for the immune system to remember its previous encounters with cancer and with infectious disease a special class of cells, called “memory T cells”, must be activated.
The goal of Dr. Madi’s proposal is to identify these memory cells at the earliest stage of their development and determine the signals required for their activation. To do so, his team will use advanced technologies and computational methods to examine gene expression in single cells to identify key regulators that are expressed during differentiation from naïve states, when cells do not recognize the tumor; to memory states, when they readily attack the tumor. These studies will reveal potential targets for therapeutic translation.
