The Dougan lab is focused on understanding the relationship between effective antitumor immunity and immune-related toxicities. Immunotherapy targeting the immune checkpoint receptors CTLA-4, PD-1 and PD-L1 has transformed the treatment landscape for a diverse range of human cancers, inducing durable remissions in tumors that were previously uniformly fatal. Yet by disabling key immune regulatory circuits, immunotherapy also induces a broad array of inflammatory toxicities. These toxicities, which often involve the gastrointestinal tract, are a window into mucosal immune regulation more generally. Using a variety of modern genomics techniques, mechanism-based clinical trials, and animal models, my group strives to define the cellular and molecular mechanisms controlled by the CTLA-4 and PD-1/PD-L1 pathways in the gut, and to use this information, paired with a detailed understanding of antitumor immunity to design new therapeutic approaches to uncouple productive antitumor responses from treatment-limiting toxicities. Insights from these experiments may also have broader implications for autoimmune disease.

The Dougan Lab also studies various gastrointestinal conditions, including Celiac Disease, Eosinophilic Esophagitis, and more.