Gary Kohanbash, PhD

Dr. Kohanbash’s research focuses on developing and improving immune-therapeutic strategies for brain tumors. Significant progress over the past decade has started to bridge the gap between basic science and clinical care of tumors, with key advances now making translation of new cancer therapies more feasible.

One key focus area of Dr. Kohanbash’s work addresses the major challenges facing cancer therapy in the current inability to monitor and deplete tumor-associated myeloid cells. His work developed an immunoPET strategy using a radiolabeled antibody to quantify myeloid cells in CNS cancer. Building upon this, he recently showed that myeloid cells could be imaged and targeted to improve therapy for gliomas using a new chelator and labeling with two separate radionuclide-labeled antibodies. This work is complemented by ongoing studies in the lab developing and evaluating immunoPET strategies to quantify T-cell activation and cytotoxicity to allow for early detection of immunotherapy responsiveness in CNS tumors. 

Another focus area of Dr. Kohanbash’s research includes the use of high-dimensional sequencing such as single cell RNAseq (scRNAseq) to identify rational immunotherapy combination strategies for adult and pediatric brain tumors and to better understand the complex immunobiology of brain tumors. Recently, he analyzed checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy for brain tumors and, through scRNAseq, demonstrated that multiple myeloid cell subtypes express specitic checkpoint receptors that he then validated in preclinical models.

In a separate study, Dr. Kohanbash performed bulk RNAseq on blood samples from immunotherapy treated oncology patients and revealed key biomarkers and molecular signatures of responders versus non-responders. A significant advancement in the field resulted from his prior work using scRNAseq to distinguish infiltrating macrophages from microglia in gliomas. Through ongoing collaborations he has demonstrated new and exciting phenotypes of proliferating glioma cells. His ongoing work includes using a single-cell RNAseq and single-cell TCR sequencing to develop both personalized and off-the-shelf T-cell receptor engineered T-cells (TCR-T) and adoptive cell therapy strategies for brain tumor patients.