University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Itay Raphael, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Neurological Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Itay received a B.S. in Biotechnology from Hadassah Academic College in Israel in 2009 and a Ph.D. in Cell and Molecular Biology from the University of Texas at San Antonio in 2016. From 2016 until 2023 he was a Postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. His research interests involve developing novel immunotherapies for brain cancers and neuroinflammatory diseases by leveraging computational methods to better analyze high dimensional omics data with combined rigorous experimental validation, focused on T cells. His current work included elucidating key immunoregulatory mechanisms guiding T cells responses and an in-depth investigation of transcriptomics and single-cell data for developing new immunotherapy targets and characterizing the immune landscape of brain tumors. His work enhanced our understanding of T cell immunobiology in brain cancers and elucidated mechanisms in the central nervous system (CNS) and in the brain tumor microenvironment (TME). This included elucidating a novel mechanism of the immune-checkpoint receptors TIGIT and PD1 in inhibiting the activation of T cells in the glioma TME and demonstrating key factors which contrabute to T cell-mediated neuroinflammationsuch as TNF and STAT3.
