My lab studies leukocyte trafficking in the setting of the immune response to tumor development, growth, and treatment. Our focus is on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that are involved in these settings. We utilize mouse tumor models to understand these interactions, and manipulate chemokine/chemokine receptor axes in order to favorably alter the leukocyte profile in the tumor microenvironment. We are investigating a number of different chemokines, but have worked extensively with a novel chemoattractant, chemerin, that we have found is downregulated in a majority of tumors. Forced re-expression of chemerin within the tumor results in reduced tumor growth and increased leukocyte infiltrate. We are working on a number of approaches to translate such findings into clinical use, such as nanoparticles, viral delivery, and novel fusion proteins. Clinically, my focus is on genitourinary immunotherapy, and we have a number of projects related to this. We are actively pursuing novel combinations of immunotherapeutics to test in humans, and plan to do in depth immune monitoring on these patients.