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Ma Laboratory for Immune Engineering
We are hiring!
The Ma Lab is recruiting highly motivated students, technicians and postdocs to carry out exciting immune engineering projects. With your passion and dedicated research effort, the cure is within reach.
Interested candidates, please send your curriculum vitae and a short description of your motivation and career goals to Dr. Ma.
The immune system is probably the most complex and sophisticated self-defense system and plays a central role in maintaining tissue homeostasis. Malfunction of the immune system is involved in many disorders, such as cancer, autoimmunity, and chronic infections. A systematic understanding and controlled intervention of immune cell signaling in lymphoid and peripheral tissues hold great promise for addressing these outstanding biomedical challenges. The research at the Ma Laboratory lies at the interface of immunology and engineering, in an emerging field: immune engineering. Our goal is to decode the molecular and cellular crosstalk between immune cells and their microenvironment in normal and pathological conditions (e.g., tumor) and leverage these crosstalk mechanisms to develop novel biomaterials, protein, and cell-based precision immunotherapies. Our research involves a combination of genetic, chemistry, engineering, computational tools, and mouse genetic models.
Project Highlights
- A synthetic booster vaccine enhances CAR T activity against solid tumors
- Matrix-anchoring cytokine therapeutics with enhanced potency and negligible toxicity
- CRIPSR-Cas9-mediated saturation mutagenesis predict clinical drug resistance with improved accuracy
Leader
Leyuan Ma, PhD
Assistant Professor, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine
Dr. Ma focuses on immune engineering. He leverages genetic, chemistry, and engineering tools to dissect immune cell-cell and cell-tissue crosstalk and harness these crosstalk mechanisms to develop biomaterials, protein, and cell-based precision immunotherapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases.