Wang Lab
Principal Investigator: Jun Wang
Institution: New York University (New York, NY)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Immunomodulatory agents blocking the immune checkpoint PD-1/PD-L1 (PD) pathway have shown remarkable clinical benefits and constitute a new standard of care for cancer treatment. The success of these agents is due to the prominent immunosuppressive function of the PD-1 receptor alongside the selective expression of its ligand, PD-L1, in the tumor microenvironment (TME), leading to a favorable efficacy-to-toxicity ratio. However, despite the vast advances provided by anti-PD therapy, only a subset of patients develops a long-term response, illustrating the need for identifying new immune modulators in the TME, especially in PD-L1 negative tumors. To achieve this, we built the first genome-scale T-cell activity screen of human membrane proteins and identified Siglec-15 as a critical immune suppressor with broad upregulation on various cancer types and a new target for cancer immunotherapy. Siglec-15 has unique molecular features compared with many other known checkpoint inhibitory ligands. It shows dominant expression on cancer cells, besides tumor-associated macrophages, and exhibits PD-L1 mutually exclusive expression pattern in human cancers. Siglec-15 blockade by a monoclonal ant…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01CA269898-04: Elucidating the Immune Suppressive Mechanism of SIGLEC-15 in the Tumor Microenvironment (2026)
- 5R35GM151972-03: Advanced Single-Cell Protein Analysis with Multiplex in Situ Tagging Array Technology (2026)
- 1R21AG092994-01A1: Regulatory Landscape of Neurodegeneration by Single-Cell Spatial Multiomics (2026)
- 5R01NS131538-03: Engineering an extracellular vesicle-based targeted regenerative nanotherapeutic for multiple sclerosis (2026)
- 5R01NS144390-02: In Utero Treatment of Dup15q Syndrome Via Lipid Nanoparticle Based Gene Editing (2026)
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