Welcome to the website for Sandra Gollnick, PhD and her team. Dr. Gollnick is a member of both the Department of Immunology and the Department of Cell Stress Biology.

Role of Acute Inflammation

Our work is focused on understanding the role of acute inflammation, induced by cancer therapies, in the development of immune responses against cancer. Our long-term goal is to develop treatments that can control both primary tumor growth and distant metastases. To generate acute inflammation in a tumor setting we use photodynamic therapy (PDT), which is a FDA approved treatment for malignant and non-malignant diseases that used a photo-reactive drug in combination with light to generate reactive oxygen. The release of reactive oxygen results in tumor cell death, which leads to induction of acute local inflammation. (To learn more about PDT click here).

My lab has shown that PDT activates innate immune cells, such as dendritic cells (Gollnick et al, Lasers Surg. Med., 2006), neutrophils (Kousis et al., Cancer Res. 2007) and natural killer cells (Kabingu et al, Br. J. Cancer, 2007), and that these cells control the function of tumor specific cytolytic T cells and their ability to control distant tumors. We are currently investigating which inflammatory mediators are critical to the induction of anti-tumor immunity following PDT.

PDT-Treated Tumor Cells Act As Anti-Tumor Vaccines

A second major focus of the lab stems from our novel findings that PDT-treated tumor cells are able to act as anti-tumor vaccines (Gollnick et al, Cancer Res., 2002). Since this finding we have gone one to demonstrate that PDT vaccines are effective adjuvants when combined with surgery and we are currently developing clinical trials to test the use of PDT vaccines in combination with surgery to treat melanoma and head and neck carcinomas. We are also working to understand the "danger signals" generated by PDT treatment of tumor cells that leads to activation of the immune response.