Douglas Hanlon, PhD

The principal focus of our laboratory group has been the development of anti-tumor immunotherapies, through extracorporeal engineering of immunostimulatory dendritic APC vaccines as well as nanotechnology platforms for antigen delivery, targeting and readout of Ag-specific responses. In addition to our "Transimmune" studies here at Yale Dermatology, an ongoing 3-year Gates Foundation funded collaboration with the Santangelo lab at Emory/GT has focused these efforts on lipid nanoparticle (LNP)-based delivery systems, relevant not only to cancer but infectious disease and immune tolerance. We have developed methodologies to rapidly differentiate physiological dendritic cells (phDC) directly from human or murine blood samples in time frames (2 hrs to o/n) previously unattainable in existing cellular therapies. We now seek to expand our immunotherapy focus from targeting tumor-associated neo-antigens to those derived from pandemic-relevant pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, chronic viral infection agents and tissue Ag for tolerance induction.