Jonathan M. Irish, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Cancer Biology and Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology at Vanderbilt University. The Irish Lab uses new tools and computational approaches to do basic and translational research in human cancer and immunology.

A specialty of the Irish lab is tracking and targeting rare populations of cells in human tissues. Close collaborations between the Irish lab and clinicians in the VICC enable Irish lab members to bring patient biopsy samples directly from the bedside into the laboratory for analysis by 'next generation' research techniques. For example, using mass cytometry Irish lab members can detect and characterize every cell in a patient's biopsy sample -- including cancer cells, immune cells, and stem cells. Dr. Irish is leading the development of mass cytometry at Vanderbilt, one of the first 15 institutions worldwide to acquire the technology. The long term goal of the Irish lab is to use single cell approaches and new knowledge of biology to detect disease earlier, create safe and effective new therapies, and to monitor and guide personalized medicine.

Ultimately, by better understanding biological systems which control cell biology 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.

The Irish lab is grateful for outstanding support from the VICC, including the VICC Ambassadors, a passionate group of volunteers and advocates dedicated to fighting cancer by supporting research:https://viccambassadors.vicc.org/

The goal to study control of signaling networks in healthy and malignant cells forms the basis of an NIH/NCI R00 grant that supports the Irish lab (5R00CA143231-04).

Research Background and Training

Dr. Irish received his Ph.D. from the Cancer Biology program at Stanford for studies in the laboratory of Dr. Garry Nolan, Ph.D., and previously earned B.S. degrees in Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Biology from the University of Michigan. For his postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Irish worked with Dr. Ronald Levy, M.D., at Stanford until founding his lab at Vanderbilt in 2012. Together with Nolan lab alumni Dr. Nikesh Kotecha and Dr. Peter Krutzik, Dr. Irish created Cytobank, a big data analytics platform used by thousands of researchers worldwide to manage, analyze, and share data from high dimensional single cell research.

During his Ph.D. research with Dr. Nolan, Dr. Irish created a new technique to measure signaling responses in individual cancer cells and applied it to the study of leukemia patient clinical outcomes (Cell 2004). An advantage of this single cell approach is that signaling can be characterized in rare populations of cancer cells and contrasted with the bulk cancer cell population or with tumor-infiltrating non-malignant cells.

In his postdoctoral research with Dr. Levy, Dr. Irish applied this 'single cell signaling profiles' technique to dissect B cell signaling in follicular lymphoma (Blood 2006) and healthy B cell development (J Immunol 2006). This project culminated in the identification of new type of lymphoma B cell termed lymphoma negative prognostic (LNP) cells. LNP cells are closely associated with progression to aggressive disease and lower overall survival (PNAS 2010). With collaborators, Dr. Irish has now shown that LNP cells exist in other B cell cancers (BMC Cancer, Br J Haematol 2012), are distinguished by a set of genetic driver mutations (Blood 2013), and suppress tumor infiltrating T cell signaling via PD-1 (Blood 2013).