BIO
Dr. Ehsan Ghorani is a CRUK Clinician Scientist Fellow in cancer immunology and consultant medical oncologist with a focus on gestational and lung cancer. The Cancer Immunology and Immunotherapy Unit How do cancers evade the immune response and what mediates immunotherapy sensitivity? What should we target to maximise patient responses? Can we predict patient outcomes and personalise therapies around this? Our lab is particularly interested in gestatational cancers as a human model of cancer immune regulation, since these tumours are unique in arising from non-self placental trophoblast cells. How does this allograft tissue evade immune escape? In parallel, we showed in 2017 that gestational cancers are exquisitely sensitive to immunotherapy with the majority of patients cured of metastatic disease using drugs that target the T cell inhibitory receptor PD1. What mediates such profound immunotherapy sensitivity? We hope that by studying these extremes of immune regulation we can learn mechanisms of immune evasion and immunotherapy sensitivity that are relevant to more common cancers. As co-PI and Translational Lead for two large investigator led immunotherapy trials; the phase III REFINE-Lung and phase II REFINE-Basket studies, our lab has unique access to patient samples to address these questions.