Dendritic cells (DCs) are professional antigen presenting cells that are specialized to capture, process and present antigens to T-cells in order to modulate immune response. The application of DCs to prime responses to tumor antigens provides a promising approach to cancer immunotherapy but clinically relevant responses have frequently been disappointing. Newer generation DC vaccines must build on the increased knowledge of DC differentiation including the generation of various DC subsets ex vivo. Several key transcription factors have been recently identified which control the specification and development of this immune cell type.
The primary research focus of our group is to generate DCs from pluripotent stem cells and modify the transcription program and immunogenicity of these cells via forced expression of lineage determining transcription factors. Our long-term goal is to control the myeloid DC/macrophage development by transcription factor mediated cellular programming. In parallel we study the genomic profiles of myeloid cells during the various stages of development. We intend to perform chromatin immunoprecipitation followed by sequencing (ChIP-seq) to identify the global list of DNA binding sites of several DC specific transcription factors in myeloid cells.