Maneesh Dave
University of California-Davis, CA·Biomedical Engineering
Inflammation drives many diseases, including inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) and graft-versus-host disease (GvHD), in which transplanted immune cells attack the patient's body. Cell therapies such as mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) can calm inflammation and have worked well in mice.
- Fields
Biomedical Engineering
Medicine & Clinical Research
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
digital pathology
computational pathology
pathomics
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2029
What they work on
- Build inflammation Digital Pathology Tools (iDPT), machine learning and pathomics modules that preprocess, annotate and quantify inflammation, using about 700 digitized H&E-stained slides from mouse models of IBD and GvHD.
- Use iDPT to evaluate how well mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs), a cell therapy that calms inflammation, suppress gut inflammation in a preclinical IBD model, confirming effective dosing and cell viability.
- Apply iDPT to test whether MSCs prevent xenogeneic graft-versus-host disease in mice and reduce inflammation caused by CAR-T therapy, a cancer treatment using engineered immune cells.
More about the research
Results in human patients have been mixed, however, and the right dose and how these cells work remain unclear. Part of the gap may come from how animal results are measured. Pathologists usually score tissue slides by eye, which is subjective and varies between scorers. Computer-based slide analysis has advanced research on human tissue, but few such tools are built for slides from animal models.
Why it matters
Standardized, automated scoring of inflamed tissue could make animal studies of new therapies more reliable and reproducible. This may help researchers judge which stem cell therapies and doses are most likely to help patients with inflammatory bowel disease, graft-versus-host disease or inflammation from CAR-T cancer therapy, and may speed discovery of new treatment targets.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
John Wagner
University of Minnesota, MN·Medicine & Clinical Research
Establish the safety and maximum tolerated dose of donor CAR19 regulatory T cells, given with and without IL-2, in patients with relapsed or refractory CD19+ acute lymphocytic leukemia, measuring cell persistence and tumor killing.
Jaebok Choi
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether drug blockade of VLDLR, a receptor on T cells, prevents graft-versus-host disease while preserving the graft-versus-leukemia effect, in two independent mouse models of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation.
Xuefang Cao
University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine whether blood-forming stem and progenitor cells use the receptor CD27 to directly suppress donor T cells, using transplants into Rag1 knockout mice that lack CD27 and NK cells, in vivo and in vitro.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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