Lu Sun

University of California; Los Angeles
Los Angeles, United States

Lu Sun, PhD, is an Assistant Project Scientist in the Department of Neurosurgery, David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA. Her research focuses on studying the mechanisms of action of immunotherapy, like anti-PD-1, in primary and metastatic brain tumors.

Lu Sun’s postdoctoral training has centered on exploiting high throughput omic data (genomic, transcriptomic and epigenomic) from patient-derived tumor tissues and murine models to study the evolution of therapeutic resistance in metastatic melanoma. As cancer therapeutics shifted from tumor cell focused to broader recognition of the immune system, she has been adopting the latest single cell sequencing and spatial transriptomics techniques to dissect the components in tumor microenvironment. Her current work, in Dr. Robert Prins’ lab, is to understand the transcriptional and phenotypic alterations induced by anti-PD-1 immune checkpoint blockade in glioblastoma and metastatic brain tumors, with an overarching goal to improve antitumoral immune response in both primary and metastatic brain tumor patients.