Awards
- Titled Professor (2023)
- Christopher Brown Professor of Immunology
About Lionel Apetoh
I am an immunologist with a strong expertise in adaptive immune responses to cancer. Challenging the view that chemotherapies only mediate their anticancer activity through a direct cytotoxic activity on tumor cells, my Ph.D. work uncovered a critical contribution of anticancer immune responses for the success of conventional therapies. This work prompted the design of novel strategies enhancing the efficacy of anticancer therapies by manipulating the immune system. During my postdoctoral work at Harvard University, I underscored the relevance of concomitant Tim-3 and PD-1 blockade to prevent T cell dysfunction and restore anticancer immunity. After returning to France, I set up my laboratory and showed the anticancer properties of a novel subset of CD4 T cells, IL-9-producing TH9 cells, upon adoptive transfer against melanoma. Thanks to funding from the European Commission, I developed in my laboratory multiple models of combination treatments with chemotherapy and immunomodulation to interrogate the relevance of T cells in anticancer cancer immune responses. In January 2023, I joined the Brown Center for Immunotherapy (Indianapolis, IN) as Christopher Brown Professor of Immunology to pursue the discovery of novel molecular targets that can be therapeutically exploited to enhance T cell functions. For this, my laboratory will combine in vitro and in vivo approaches including advanced gene and protein expression analysis of mouse and human T cells, immunological investigation of the anticancer responses in transgenic, gene-deficient mice as well as spontaneous and transplantable models of cancers.