Shivani Srivastava, Ph.D.

Dr. Shivani Srivastava works to improve cancer immunotherapies, treatments which harness the immune system to treat tumors. In particular, she focuses on immune cells known as T cells, which can seek out and selectively kill infected or diseased cells. Capitalizing on this ability, scientists have genetically engineered T cells to kill tumor cells. The first F.D.A.-approved T-cell based immunotherapies used a lab-created anti-cancer receptor known as a chimeric antigen receptor, or CAR, to guide engineered T cells to cancer. Dr. Srivastava aims to make CAR-T cell therapies even more effective by applying insights gleaned from studying how normal T cells respond to disease. To do this, she uses cutting-edge technologies to examine how normal and engineered T cells perform within tumors in order to identify and remove the barriers that block CAR T cells from working optimally.