Lee Lab

Led by principle investigator DaeYong Lee, Ph.D., the Lee lab develops various types of biomaterials to enhance anti-tumor immune responses without toxic effects, and to understand their therapeutic mechanisms in a range of cancers including melanoma, breast cancers, brain cancers, and lung cancers. Given the current stage of immunotherapy, a small fraction of cancer patients benefit from current immunotherapeutic strategies. Lee and his team design novel biomaterials by considering biological variables such sex, age, health condition, cancer/immune heterogeneity to reduce disparities in therapeutic outcomes in clinic.

Techniques

• The lab engineers various types of organic biomaterials such as polypeptides, synthetic polymers, and carbohydrate polymers tailed for cancer immunotherapy applications using organic chemistry knowledge.
• The team physically characterizes synthetic biomaterials by performing NMR spectrometry, circular dichroism spectropolarimetry, and size exclusion chromatography to verify the endowment of desired functionalities in biomaterial engineering.
• The lab employs a variety of in vitro assays such as flow cytometry, quantitative PCR, western blotting, and confocal laser scanning microscopy to elucidate immune responses and molecular signaling pathways triggered by our biomaterials.
• Lee's team evaluates therapeutic effects of biomaterials in various tumor-bearing mouse models including breast tumor, melanoma, and glioblastoma and reveal how biomaterials modulate tumor microenvironments to elicit antitumor effects by utilizing genetic knockout mouse strains to clearly verify therapeutic mechanisms.
• The lab's multidisciplinary studies require a diverse skillset including expertise in biomaterial engineering, tumor immunology and animal handling.