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Administrative POD2 Basic Science Research

Jonathan Irish

Assistant Professor, Cell and Developmental Biology
Assistant Professor, Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology

A central goal of our research at Vanderbilt is to understand how changes at the single cell level alter signaling in healthy cells and lead to therapy resistant populations in human diseases. In the Irish Lab, we use new tools and computational approaches to do basic and translational research in human cancer and immunology.

In addition to making discoveries at the frontier of human genetics and immunology, we aspire to use knowledge of cell signaling to create therapeutic technologies and to guide clinical decisions. In the long term, great potential exists to detect disease earlier and to tailor a patient’s therapy to the biological alterations detected in the cells of their disease. By better understanding biological systems which control development and cell-cell interactions in healthy and diseased contexts, we can learn to program cells to become therapeutic agents or target malignant signaling events to specifically kill cancer cells.