Shoubao Ma, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in City of Hope’s Department of Hematology & Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation. Over the course of the past 15 years – including five years as a visiting scholar and postdoctoral fellow at City of Hope – Dr. Ma has led and contributed to pioneering research in the fields of immunology, cancer immunotherapy, and transplantation immunology.
Dr. Ma authored 47 peer-reviewed publications, with 27 as first author, co-first author, or senior/co-senior author, in prestigious journals such as Nature Immunology (2022, 2023), Cancer Discovery (2019), Science Immunology (2023, 2024), Journal of Experimental Medicine (2021), PNAS (2022), Trends in Immunology (2022), Molecular Cancer (2022), Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy (2019, 2022), Journal of Hematology & Oncology (2022), Cancer Research (2014, 2023), and Journal of Immunology (2014). He has received several national and institutional awards for his innovative research, including a National Scholarship (2013), the Excellent Doctoral Dissertation Award (2015), The American Association of Immunologists Annual Meeting Travel Award (2019), and the Early Career Faculty Grant (2024).
The overarching goal of Dr. Ma’s laboratory is twofold: (1) to uncover the mechanisms that regulate the proliferation, survival, function, and exhaustion of natural killer (NK) cells, and to apply this knowledge to improve NK and CAR-NK cell therapies for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and inflammatory diseases; and (2) to elucidate how RNA modifications control essential aspects of immunity, including immune recognition, activation of innate and adaptive responses, and immune cell fate decisions. The lab also investigates how dysregulation of RNA modifications contributes to the onset and progression of diseases, particularly cancer.
