ASCI / Emerging-Generation Awards, 2023

Nicholas Borcherding, MD, PhD, MS seeks to become a physician-scientist, researching and focusing his clinical efforts on developing and modulating the tumor microenvironment. More broadly, his general interest is in the interface of computational immunology and cancer biology, taking research from the processor to the patient. As an MD/PhD student with Dr. Weizhou Zhang, Dr. Borcherding's work centered around the characterization of microenvironment heterogeneity in renal clear cell carcinoma using single-cell sequencing. Specifically, this work, supported by the F30 CA206255 grant and an American Medical Association Seed Grant, characterized a novel subset of highly suppressive tumor-infiltrating regulatory T cells across multiple cancers with prognostic and therapeutic applications. This effort led to a co-first author publication in Nature Communications, in addition to publications resulting from developing tools for single-cell analysis, including the first immune repertoire analysis pipeline for single-cell sequencing and single-cell-specific gene set enrichment analysis. After Dr. Borcherding's thesis defense and during his clinical years of medical school, he became involved in aberrant T cell transcriptional states in skin diseases, such as cutaneous T cell lymphoma and alopecia areata. These investigations resulted in an adjunct research appointment in the Department of Dermatology at the University of Iowa, which he still maintains, and multiple first-author publications in JCI Insight, Clinical Cancer Research, and Blood Advances. During his residency, Dr. Borcherding joined the laboratories of Drs. Jonathan Brestoff and David DeNardo to study the intercellular mitochondria transfer in adipose tissue and pancreatic malignancies. Although early in his post-doctoral studies, he led investigations into tissue- and diet-specific alterations in adipocyte-derived mitochondria transfer which led to a recent publication in Cell Metabolism. Dr. Borcherding's research goal is to extend the ability to track intercellular mitochondria by leveraging single-cell sequencing modalities, moving beyond fluorescent tags, and opening the field to wider investigations of human pathophysiology and possible therapeutic manipulation.