Bao Vuong
CUNY City College, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research
Immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICIs), drugs that release the brakes on the immune system so it can attack cancer, are now widely used. But they also cause inflammatory and autoimmune side effects, called immune-related adverse events, in 40–60% of treated patients.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
immune checkpoint inhibitors
cancer immunotherapy
immune-related adverse events
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Describe the immune biology of skin side effects from immune checkpoint inhibitors using biological samples from an expanded cancer patient cohort.
- Test how social indicators of health and allostatic load, the body's accumulated stress burden, relate to the severity of immunotherapy skin side effects.
- Run a two-arm pilot randomized trial of intensive patient navigation and side-effect management versus usual care in lower-income patients, measuring whether they stay on immune checkpoint inhibitors at 6 months.
More about the research
These side effects can force patients to stop treatment, lower quality of life and shorten survival, and outcomes tend to be worse for patients with fewer medical and social resources. The grants here come from a City College of New York (CCNY) and Memorial Sloan Kettering partnership focused on translational cancer research. Its projects span the biology and social factors behind ICI side effects, small molecules that regulate cancer-driving transcription factors (proteins that switch genes on), AI-assisted medical interpreting, and inherited and other factors shaping lung tumor genomes.
Why it matters
Cancer patients receiving immunotherapy, especially those with low income or few resources, could benefit if side effects are predicted before therapy and better managed. This could help them stay on treatment longer and keep a better quality of life. The findings could guide counseling before treatment, supportive care and choice of cancer regimens.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yili Zhang
Georgetown University, DC·Computer Science
Develop a large language model–based natural language processing pipeline that extracts immune-related adverse event evidence, type and grade from de-identified clinical notes, creating a reusable annotated corpus.
Robert Winchester
Columbia University, NY·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether immune checkpoint inhibitors convert PD-1+ tissue-resident memory (TRM) T cells in osteoarthritic joints into inflammatory effector T cells, using a longitudinal patient study that traces T-cell receptor (TCR) clonotypes as lineage barcodes.
Carrie Daniel-MacDougall
University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether a prebiotic food-enriched diet (PreFED), delivered as prebiotic foods plus nutrition counseling, changes the gut microbiome and blood metabolites of metastatic melanoma patients receiving checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy.
The school
CUNY City College: 9 labs on PI Pages, $72M a year on research, 31 research doctorates a year.
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