Our Lab

 


Our Lab

Our Scientific Approach:

We employ cutting-edge genomics approaches to elucidate the role of T cells in immunohomeostasis and disease. We apply this knowledge to elucidate the cellular players and molecular circuitry that drive pathological changes in the skin in diseases such as skin cancer, cancer of skin immune cells, and autoimmune disease.

Currently, there is an unprecedented opportunity to study and modify T cells in the setting of disease.

The goal is to translate these findings to clinical trials. Learn more about recent publications from the lab.


Current Projects

  • T Cell Engineering: We have leveraged evolutionary principles to design what we think are best-in-class T cell therapies for cancer. In a manuscript in press at Nature, we leveraged somatic mutations derived from T cell neoplasms in humans. These mutations confer fitness advantages that enable improved survival and fitness in the tumor microenvironment. When applied as potency enhancements to adoptive T cell therapies, we can cure solid tumors in syngeneic and xenograft models with small numbers of T cells.
  • Curing Autoimmune Disease: We are using single-cell RNA-seq and other high dimensional assays to identify putative pathogenic T cells in autoimmune and autoinflammatory diseases. We are then utilizing CRISPR screens to identify putative targets for T cell reprogramming.
  • T Cell Cancers: We have a robust and growing clinically and genomically annotated database of T cell lymphomas. We are leveraging this dataset to identify clinically actionable biomarkers and novel therapeutic targets.

We are looking for motivated, energetic postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and bioinformaticians to join the Choi lab. If you are interested, please contact us:

Jaehyuk Choi
Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
303 East Superior St.
Chicago, IL 60611
jaehyuk.choi@northwestern.edu.


“Cancer was not disorganized chromosomal chaos. It was organized chromosomal chaos.”
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer