Janis Taube

Affiliation

Johns Hopkins Hospital

Track

Biography

Dr. Taube’s research interests center on the immune evasion by solid tumors, specifically studying the PD-L1/PD-1 axis, and the identification of potential biomarkers that can help select patients with malignancies for novel immunotherapeutic treatment regimens. This requires a focus on immunohistochemical and molecular methods for identifying cell surface antigens and signaling pathways in paraffin-embedded tissue. Dr. Taube’s lab described PD-L1-mediated adaptive immune resistance by melanoma, a finding which has now been extended to other tumor types. Dr. Taube’s laboratory also developed the PD-L1 immunohistochemical assay and scoring system for the first in-human anti-PD-1 and anti-PD-L1 immunotherapies, versions of which are now FDA approved. Ongoing efforts by the Taube laboratory focus on further characterizing the local, pre-treatment and on-treatment tumor microenvironment with the aim of developing rational treatment combinations and improving patient selection algorithms for immunotherapeutic regimens.