Kellie Smith, PhD

The Pierre Massion Lung Cancer Discovery Award

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a moderate impact on our work, however it was not as severe as previous years. Most of our setbacks were in the form of childcare issues due to school and daycare closures and recurrent supply chain issues, including pipette tip shortages! We are making excellent progress so far in our project and have already generated a wealth of data from untreated lung tumors. The PhD student in my lab leading this work, Sydney Connor, is presenting her work at the TRCCC regional meeting next month and will be submitting an abstract to the SITC annual meeting this year.

Update: We have generated high quality single cell transcriptomic data from 15 resected, early stage lung tumors. Not only do we have information on T cells, but also on myeloid cells, tumor cells, and other stromal cells that have not been previously studied in lung cancer. We are now in a unique position to study the intricate communication pathways between tumor-reactive TIL and other cells in the TME.