My research focuses on the balance between protective antitumor immunity and immunotherapy toxicities. Immunotherapy toxicities are a major limitation of current treatment; at the same time, these toxicities provide a window into the mechanisms that govern immune regulation in humans.

Gastrointestinal (GI) toxicities are among the most common severe toxicities from immunotherapy, and I have made practice changing contributions studying them, defining subtypes (Hughes MS. JITC. 2019; Badran YR. JITC. 2020), establishing predictors of treatment outcome (Mooradian M. JITC. 2020), and introducing strategies for mitigating toxicity recurrence (Badran YR. JITC. 2019; Badran YR. JITC. 2023). I co-led the largest retrospective analysis of patients with cancer and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) treated with immunotherapy (Abu-Sbeih H. JCO. 2020), providing evidence that treating this population with immunotherapy was a manageable risk, and I am now the national lead for a prospective trial validating these findings (NCT03816345).

In addition to clinical research, I co-led a team that completed a detailed molecular and cellular analyses of immunotherapy induced colitis using single cell RNAseq (Luoma AM. Cell. 2020). This work is the first of its kind for any immunotherapy toxicity and demonstrated that these toxicities are driven by activation and expansion of resident memory CD8+ T cells.

In a parallel line of research, my lab uses mouse tumor models to develop and evaluate novel strategies for enhancing therapeutic responses to immunotherapy while avoiding treatment related toxicities. We pioneered targeting cytokines using single domain antibodies (Dougan M. CIR. 2018), and worked extensively with David Baker’s group to design cytokines with novel properties (Silva DA, Nature, 2019 and Quijano-Rubio A, Nat Biotechnol. 2023).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, I pursued a collaboration with Eli Lilly to develop monoclonal antibodies for SARS-CoV-2, culminating in Emergency Use Authorizations for Bamlanivimab and Etesevimab (Dougan et al. NEJM. 2021).