Christine Brown Lab

Maryam Aftabizadeh, Ph.D., earned her B.S. in biology in Tehran, Iran. Dr. Aftabizadeh moved to Germany to join a postgraduate program at RWTH Aachen, one of Germany’s Universities of Excellence, where she completed her Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular cell biology. To pursue her interest in cancer biology and immunology, she joined the Department of Immuno-Oncology at City of Hope to work with Hua Yu, Ph.D., and, afterward, with a desire to understand the role of the tumor microenvironment in growth and progression of GBM, she joined the lab of Marcin Kortylewski, Ph.D., in the same department. She joined Dr. Brown’s lab as a staff scientist. Her project is concerned with, but not limited to, designing and executing immunochemical studies, including immunohistochemistry, immunofluorescence and mass cytometry (CyTOF), coupled with analyses using high dimensional imaging software to profile immune cell infiltrates in GBM tumors. Dr. Aftabizadeh’s goals are to understand and surmount barriers limiting application of CAR T cell immunotherapy to glioblastoma and other primary and metastatic brain tumors. These barriers include the immunosuppressive microenvironment, T cell persistence and exhaustion and tumor antigen escape.
 

Brenda Aguilar earned her B.S. in animal science from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and her Registered Veterinary Technology License from Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California. She joined City of Hope in 1998 in the Division of Comparative Medicine/Animal Resources working as an Animal Health Technician. In 2003, Brenda joined the laboratory of Michael Jensen, M.D., as a research associate where she studied trafficking and anti-tumor efficacy of CAR T cells against glioblastoma. In 2015, Aguilar was promoted to staff scientist and is now the comparative medicine studies Aguilar currently works with Christine Brown, Ph.D., in the optimization of CAR T cell therapy for optimizing clinical parameters and translating this therapy to patients. She is also involved with a project that aims to understand the tumor microenvironment and tumor architecture of GBM using chromogenic multiplex immunohistochemistry.

Darya Alizadeh, Ph.D. is an assistant research professor in the Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation at City of Hope. Dr. Alizadeh earned her B.S. in engineering from University of Orumieh in Iran. Later, she earned her M.S. in molecular biology from California State University, Fullerton and her doctoral degree in cancer biology from the University of Arizona.
 
She then completed her postdoctoral fellowship at City of Hope studying glioma immunotherapy. Dr. Alizadeh has extensive expertise in immuno-oncology and immunotherapy. Her research focuses on identifying the drivers of immune response and resistance in brain tumors. As part of the CAR T cell therapy program at City of Hope, one of her primary research efforts is focused on deciphering the pathways that may impair the efficacy of CAR T cell therapy and to further develop strategies to target the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment to enhance immunotherapies for gliomas, including CAR T cell therapy. Her studies focus on elucidating the interplay between the endogenous immune system, CAR T cells and gliomas, both clinically and preclinically.
 
Dr. Alizadeh also provides scientific insight for correlative studies from the ongoing clinical trials focused on the treatment of recurrent glioma patients with CAR T cells. She is part of a multidisciplinary network of scientists and clinicians aiming to improve the outcome for cancer patients.

Franklin Chen, B.S, is a research associate in the Christine Brown Lab at City of Hope.

Ramsinh Dodia earned his M.S. in biotechnology and bioinformatics from California State University, Channel Islands, followed by a CIRM internship at the University of California, San Diego, where he conducted stem cell research. Dodia enthusiastically joined City of Hope in 2018, working directly with Christine Brown, Ph.D., and is currently involved in correlative studies for the GBM CAR T cell clinical trials with a focus on immune monitoring and analysis of patient samples.

Sharareh Gholamin, M.D., graduated from Shahid Beheshti Medical School in Tehran, Iran. Dr. Gholamin later moved to Stanford University, where she studied in the laboratories of Irving Weissman and Samuel Cheshier to advance humanized anti-CD47 antibody as a potent and safe modality for pediatric and adult brain tumors. The outcome of their work established a foundation for future clinical application of anti-CD47 antibody. In collaboration with other neuro-oncology laboratories at Stanford, she contributed to molecular oncology research to decipher the pathogenesis of brain tumors.

Building upon her experience in conducting translational studies, Dr. Sharareh joined the California Institute of Technology Biology and Bioengineering Ph.D. program in 2016 to further expand her knowledge in cancer immunotherapy. She is currently working on her thesis research at City of Hope under the supervision of Christine Brown, Ph.D., and Stephen Forman, M.D. She is fascinated by the bench-to-bedside emphasis at City of Hope, where the T Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratory program can easily transfer their findings at the bench to patients. Working closely with Darya Alizadeh, Ph.D., Gholamin currently focuses on understanding the mechanism of response and resistance to combination of CAR T cell therapies and checkpoint blockades using glioma and melanoma models. When she is back at the clinic, she envisions applying the acquired expertise to biological problems and making progress in the fight against cancer.

Research Focus

• Regenerative therapies for central nervous system diseases
• Neural stem cell and immunotherapy approach
• Stem cell biology
• NSC-mediated enzyme/prodrug therapy
• Pediatric brain tumor models
• Stem Cell Manufacturing, Terumo BCT
• Development of neural stem cells for neurodegenerative diseases

Before joining City of Hope, Jim O’Hearn, Ph.D., served in the United States Marine Corps as a communication electronics technician, obtaining the rank of sergeant. During his service, he earned his associate degree in liberal arts with high honors from Copper Mountain College in Joshua Tree, California.
 
While completing a B.S. in biochemistry with departmental honors from California State University, Los Angeles, Dr. O’Hearn used bioinformatics, liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to understand the role of cysteine thiol oxidation in cancer biology with Dr. Jamil Momand. Dr. O’Hearn pursued a M.S. in biochemistry at Cal State LA before leaving to earn his doctorate in molecular, cellular and integrative physiology from University of California, Los Angeles.
 
As part of collaborations in the Cardiovascular Research Laboratories, Dr. O’Hearn conducted several investigations into the effects of the β-adrenergic receptor (β-AR) on cardiac hypertrophy and heart failure--the leading cause of death worldwide--with Drs. Yibin Wang, Jake Lusis, Jim Weiss, Tom Vondriska and Christoph Rau. Using β-AR agonists combined with a Hybrid Mouse Diversity Panel, echocardiography, cell culture, and gene manipulation, they validated systems biology approaches to unbiased hypothesis-driven discoveries of single nucleotide polymorphisms that were causal for β-AR-mediated hypertrophy and fibrosis. In addition, this work generated a mouse model for investigating diastolic dysfunction, an enigmatic, prevalent factor in the vascular pressure/volume relationship.
 
In 2017, Dr. O’Hearn came to City of Hope through the Office of Quality Systems. As part of the Center for Biomedicine & Genetics, he led a Quality Assurance team for production of NurOwn (autologous MSC-NTF cells), a cell therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This was a City of Hope first for manufacture of a product for a phase 3 clinical trial and raised quality standards for phase 3 trials within City of Hope’s Office of Quality Systems. Dr. O’Hearn now is a project development scientist within Clinical and Translational Project Development led by Sandra Thomas, Ph.D., and functions as the project manager for Christine Brown, Ph.D.

Cheng-Fu (Jeff) Kuo earned a B.S. in life science from National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan, and later completed his M.S. in molecular microbiology and immunology from the University of Southern California, where his research mainly focused on hepatitis B and C viruses. Kuo is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences at City of Hope and his projects involve combining meditope technology into CAR designs, conferring new functionality to CAR T cells. The novel platform for CAR design will greatly improve CAR T cells manufacture and therapeutic potential.

Chetan obtained his B.E. in Biotechnology from RV College of Engineering (VTU) in India and a M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles. Upon graduation, he worked at Amgen in Thousand Oaks, CA, developing electronic lab notebooks for use in Quality Control. Thereafter, he joined City of Hope in November 2016 to help with longitudinal immune monitoring of HCT patients who received a CMV vaccine. In November 2020, he transferred to the Brown Lab to utilize and improve on his skills in correlative studies while contributing to the development of CAR T cell therapy against brain tumors. When he is not working in the lab, he enjoys playing sports, and watching movies and standup comedies.

Madeleine Maker earned a B.A. in biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology from Whitman College. After joining the Christine Brown Lab in August 2019, she has been working on the team of Darya Alizadeh Ph.D., studying the effect the tumor microenvironment has on CAR T cell efficacy. Her work primarily deals with in vivo murine glioma models. 

Robyn (Wong) Nee earned a B.S. in chemistry and integrative biology at University of California, Berkeley. She began her research as an undergraduate, publishing her work on the phylogeography of the African Helmeted Terrapin. She was then selected as a CIRM Bridges intern, successfully completing her work with Dr. William Weiss and Dr. Qi-Wen Fan at University of California, San Francisco. Her project focused on small molecule inhibition of the mTOR pathway as a combination therapy in glioblastoma. In 2016, she joined the team of Christine Brown, Ph.D., at City of Hope and has worked closely with Darya Alizadeh, Ph.D., to dissect the mechanism of maintaining an IL15-mediated stem cell-like phenotype in CAR T cells. Her current work is focused on understanding the tumor microenvironment in syngeneic mouse models of glioblastoma.

Hernán Reza, M.S., grew up in Pico Rivera, California, and earned his B.S. in microbiology with a minor in chemistry and M.S. in biological sciences at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Mentored by Dr. Jill Adler-Moore, he focused on the development and optimization of a novel liposomal vaccine against the fungal infection pulmonary aspergillosis caused by Aspergillus fumigatus. Reza is currently pursuing his doctorate at the Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences at City of Hope. His work with Christine Brown, Ph.D., and Zhiqiang (Daniel) Wang, Ph.D., focuses on improving the efficacy of CAR T cell therapy against solid tumors, targeting the adenosinergic pathway in the tumor microenvironment via gene editing technology.

Vanessa Salvary joined City of Hope in August 2020 with a passion for research and helping people. She received her B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona and plans to pursue a graduate degree to further her research career in the field of data analysis and immunology. She earned her Laboratory Animal Technician certification in February 2020 and is currently pursuing her Laboratory Animal Technologist certificate. She has seven years of experience working with animals in research and veterinary hospital settings. Salvary is eager to be part of the TCTRL team to develop and translate her benchwork and computational skills to help advance treatment and restore wellness and hope for GBM patients.

Supraja Saravanakumar earned a B.S. in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior at University of California, Davis. Her interest in research was acquired from leading the Diabetes Support Group at the Willow Clinic in Sacramento, CA. She worked in Dr. Mark Huising’s lab as an undergraduate, publishing her work on virgin beta cell proliferation in diabetes. Following graduation, she worked with Dr. Markus Müschen at the City of Hope, studying the effect of ZAP70 on B-cells in the development of autoimmune disease and B-cell malignancies. In 2020, she joined the Brown lab and has worked closely with Darya Alizadeh, Ph.D and Sharareh Gholamin, M.D. to understand the effect of the tumor environment in glioma and melanoma models. Ultimately, she is passionate about providing free medical care to the underserved and she hopes that the findings from her research can be translated to all patients effectively and fairly.

Renate Starr, M.S., earned her B.S. in biological sciences from University of California, Irvine and her M.S. from California Polytechnic University Pomona for the research she conducted to better understand botulinum neurotoxin in Clostridium botulinum Type A strains. Her career at City of Hope began in 2005, when she joined the lab of Michael Jensen, M.D., as a research associate II. Under the direction of Christine Brown, Ph.D., the research at that time was focused on cancer stem cells in glioblastoma in relationship to their targetability by CAR T cells and has evolved to include many different CAR T cell strategies to target and kill glioblastoma. In 2010, Starr was promoted to senior research associate and, in addition to working under Dr. Brown on the GBM project, became the laboratory manager. That same year, Dr. Jensen left City of Hope and leadership of the lab was transferred to Stephen Forman, M.D. In 2015, Starr was promoted to staff scientist and now manages the T Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratory, which includes laboratories led by Dr. Forman, Dr. Brown, Saul Priceman, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Budde, M.D., Ph.D. Starr feels honored to have been part of this amazing program for so long and to have been given the opportunity to grow and evolve alongside the program.

Sean Sepulveda’s interest in biology began at a young age. His fascination with how spiders liquified their food sparked curiosity in enzymes and led to an interest in biochemistry, which was his major at University of California, Irvine. His accomplishments included a first author paper, exploring the effects of injury and stress on the aging process in fruit flies. This was followed by a journey to the East Coast that would last 12 years and is where he discovered his love of cancer immunotherapy. After seeing a picture of lung cancer before and after immunotherapy at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Sepulveda pursued and completed a master’s degree in cell and molecular biology at Boston University. After studying specific T cell responses at Massachusetts General Hospital, Sepulveda moved back to California and is currently analyzing glioblastoma samples at City of Hope as a research associate II.
 

Lusine Tsaturyan, M.D., graduated from Yerevan State Medical School in Armenia. She joined City of Hope in 2015. In the Department of Developmental and Stem Cell Biology, she was actively involved in translational research, studying neural stem cells as delivery vehicles of chemotherapeutic drugs to brain tumors. To pursue her interest in translational research and continue her work in developing and optimizing treatments for brain tumors, she joined the T Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratory in 2019. Dr. Tsaturyan looks forward to the opportunity to expand her knowledge in brain tumor immunology and CAR-targeted therapy for brain tumors under the leadership of Christine Brown, Ph.D.

Simiao Wang earned a B.S. in biological sciences from China Agricultural University in Beijing, China and later completed her M.S. in biochemistry and molecular medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, where her research mainly focused on hippocampal neural stem cells derived from human iPSCs and CHARGE syndrome. Wang is currently a graduate student in the Irell & Manella Graduate School of Biological Sciences at City of Hope and her project is focused on tumor heterogeneity, tumor microenvironment, and CAR T cell therapy using tumor organoids as a research model.

Zhiqiang (Daniel) Wang, Ph.D., is an assistant research professor in the T Cell Therapeutic Research Laboratory program at City of Hope with expertise in stem cell biology and CAR T cell immunotherapy. Dr. Wang’s team focuses on using state-of-the-art induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC), CAR engineering and gene editing technologies to develop next generation, super-powered, off-the-shelf, universal CAR T and CAR NK cell products for cellular immunotherapy against hematopoietic malignancies and solid tumors.
 
Dr. Wang received his B.S. in pharmacy in 2002 and Ph.D. in medicine pharmacology in 2007 from Zhejiang University at Hangzhou in China. He studied pluripotent stem cell differentiation and drug discovery during his doctoral training and the first year of postdoctoral training at the University of Southern California. Dr. Wang came to City of Hope in 2008, studying cancer stem cells, hematopoietic malignancies and epigenetic regulation mechanisms. Dr. Wang then joined T Cell Therapeutics Research Laboratory in 2017 to pursue his interest in cellular immunotherapy and translational research.   
 
Dr. Wang’s team established a 3D organoid co-culture system to generate CAR T and CAR NK cells from CAR-expressing iPSC. With the unique feature of unlimited self-renewal capability, iPSC can serve as a cell resource to generate an unlimited number of CAR T cells. Gene editing has been used to address histocompatibility issues. One of his ultimate goals is to develop off-the-shelf, universal iPSC-derived CAR T cells to broaden the applications of CAR T cell therapy. They are also working on improving the efficacy of CAR T cells by targeting exhaustion and immunosuppression related genes and pathways employing CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing technologies.

Agata Xella earned her B.S. in biotechnology with honors from University of Bologna in Italy. During this time, she spent a year as an exchange student at University of California, San Diego, where she found her passion for medical research and fell in love with Southern California.
 
Xella completed her M.S. in biomedical sciences from Sanford Burnham Prebys Cancer Center in San Diego under the guidance of Dr. Wechsler-Reya. Her work focused on uncovering the role of the Musashi family of RNA-binding proteins in the rise and development of childhood brain tumor, medulloblastoma.
 
Following graduation, Xella moved back to Europe and settled in London where she worked for Synexa Life Sciences studying biomarker analysis for clinical trial samples.
 
Xella joined the Christine Brown Lab in early 2020 and is working to improve GBM-targeted CAR T cell therapy. She applies her expertise in brain cancer and immunological techniques to several projects and aims to expand her contributions and develop knowledge relevant to data analysis and combinational therapies.

Xin (Cindy) Yang earned a M.S. in animal science with a specialized focus on biotechnology/stem cell biology from Purdue University. Yang joined City of Hope in 2015 and has been actively researching CAR T cell therapy against glioblastoma multiform under the leadership of Christine Brown, Ph.D. Yang's interest in perfecting CAR T cell therapy include, but are not limited to, exploring new CAR targets, CAR structure designs, patient product bioactivities and associated clinical responses. She is passionate about promoting translational technology applications and collaborations on emerging fields.