Professor Douglas Fearon

Interests

A confocal image of EGFP-positive stromal cells in a B16 melanoma that express fibroblast activation protein-alpha and that mediate local immunosuppression.
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We are an immunology lab. We study CD8+ T cell differentiation, and immunosuppression within the tumor microenvironment. Since the CD8+ T cell is the primary mediator of anti-tumor immunity, the two themes are related. We have developed mouse models to study (1) the development of the memory CD8+ T cell, and (2) a tumoral stromal cell that is found in all human carcinomas and a variety of other sterile inflammatory lesions. In our CD8+ T cell studies, we have shown that a subset of effector CD8+ T cells maintain a replicative function, which will help us now to consider strategies for preserving this essential aspect of the CD8+ T cell response in adoptive T cell therapy for cancer. For our tumoral stromal cell work, we have just found that conditional ablation of a single stromal cell type abolishes immunosuppression within the tumor microenvironment and permits immunological control of tumor growth. We seek to apply this finding to improving therapeutic tumor vaccination.

Research Focus

Keywords

T lymphocytes

Tumor immunology

Stromal cells

Immunosuppression

Cancer sites

No direct clinical relevance

Equipment

BAC transgenesis, FACS

Cell culture

Confocal microscopy

DNA sequencing

Fluorescence microscopy

Imaging

Immunohistochemistry

In vivo modelling

PCR

Protein purification

Recombinant protein expression

RNAi