Klopp Laboratory

Our lab’s goal is to reduce the global morbidity and mortality of gynecologic cancers in women treated with radiation therapy. We aim to understand how the tumor microenvironment evolves during radiation treatment in order to develop new strategies to enhance radiation response. Our long-term goal is to rationally combine targeted or immune therapies with advanced radiation techniques to increase radiation treatment response, facilitating both improved disease control and reducing toxicity of treatment.

Together with colleagues at MD Anderson, we developed techniques to non-invasively sample cervical cancers undergoing radiation therapy for longitudinal molecular profiling. With this approach we have characterized the kinetics of immune infiltration in cervical cancers, identified microbiome predictors of response and used TCR sequencing to define candidate HPV reactive T-cell clones that expand in treatment responders. 

Our current focus is determining if tumor directed vaccination will improve outcomes in women with cervical cancers. In our clinical trial, Immunocerv, we are collecting tumor specimens in patients treated with vaccination and chemoradiation to understand how these two therapies may synergize to generate anti-tumor immune response.