ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2023
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Andrew Chow, MD, PhD started his research career as an undergraduate volunteer in the laboratory of Marcel van den brink at MSKCC. Before immunotherapy became standard of care in many cancer types, his project in the lab focused on enhancing anti-tumor T cell responses through co-stimulatory receptor activation. His graduate work under the mentorship of Miriam Merad and the late Paul Frenette at Mount Sinai centered on the ontogeny and homeostasis of tissue resident- macrophages and their relevance in hematopoietic stem and progenitor cell trafficking and red blood cell development. During the research phase of his medical oncology fellowship at MSKCC and continuing into his early faculty years, Dr. Chow has been mentored by Charles Rudin and Jedd Wolchok. A substantial portion of his post-doctoral research effort has focused on characterizing how Tim-4+ pleural and peritoneal macrophages impair anti-tumor T cell immunity in the serous body cavities. In parallel, he has also spent the last four years investigating human tumor-reactive T cells. Dr. Chow has contributed new insights into the transcriptional, proteomic, spatial and temporal characteristics of tumor-reactive T cells in human lung cancer.
As a natural extension of these studies, Dr. Chow's research group will leverage immunological principles to develop novel therapies to treat lung cancer. They will address two major questions during the initial phase of my research program: 1) What are strategies to not only block macrophage-mediated suppression but also leverage macrophage effector function? and 2) How do lung cancer-directed therapies (e.g. chemotherapy, PD-1 axis blockade, targeted therapies, and adoptive T cell therapies) modulate the quality and quantity of human tumor-reactive CD8 T cells?