Keara Lane, PhD
Assistant Professor, Molecular Biosciences; Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences
Research Program
Cancer-Focused Research
Inflammation is a hallmark of cancer and primary driver of metastatic dysregulation, often mediated by activation of innate immune cells. Research in the Lane lab is focused on understanding how cell-to-cell variation in the interactions between innate immune cells and pathogens determines infection outcome. During infection innate immune cell function must be precisely regulated; an inadequate response can lead to uncontrolled or chronic infection, while an excessive response can result in collateral tissue damage. Dysregulation of innate immune cell function is also known to play a role in multiple stages of tumor development - from the tissue damage and inflammation associated with tumor initiation, to the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment generated by tumor-associated macrophages. Therefore, a universal question that emerges across both infection and cancer is how individual immune cells make decisions about the type, intensity, and duration of the response to execute and how variability in such decisions can lead to disease. In the Lane lab we are primarily interested in understanding the dynamics, that is the time axis, of this decision-making process in innate immune cells during infection. To do this we combine live-cell imaging, microfluidics, and single-cell RNA-Seq to generate a quantitative profile of immune cell behavior. Our long-term goal is to translate this quantitative understanding into an improved ability to engineer innate immune cells with predictable behavior and to deploy these cells as immunotherapies for both infection and cancer.