Lab Overview

Dr. Nemenoff is a Professor in the Department of Medicine. The Nemenoff Laboratory is focused on the role of the microenvironment in mediating progression of disease. A major effort is focused on the immune microenvironment in the setting of lung cancer progression. Recent clinical advances have changed the landscape for patients with lung cancer. The advent of immunotherapy has resulted in multiple new treatments. These include immune checkpoint inhibitors that block immunosuppressive pathways, leading to activation of T cells and tumor elimination. Secondly, the identification of targeted oncogenic drivers has resulted in precision medicine approaches using specific inhibitors of these proteins. While these changes have improved clinical outcomes, the majority of patients either fail to respond or eventually develop resistance. The Nemenoff lab is using innovative preclinical models to define how changes in the populations of innate and adaptive immune cells determine the clinical response to these therapies.

Our lab in collaboration with other investigators, as part of the Thoracic Oncology Research Initiative, have developed a panel of lung cancer cell lines with distinct oncogenic drivers that we can implant into the lungs of syngeneic mice to reproduce the heterogeneity of response to therapy that is observed in patients. The lab is studying how changes in immune cell populations underlie this heterogeneity, with the goal of developing novel combination therapies for the treatment of lung cancer. In this effort the lab collaborates with other basic science labs, as well as clinical investigators.