Advancements in Genetic Engineering
Open Access

Arvind Chhabra

Biography

Arvind Chhabra is an Assistant Professor at Department of Medicine and Stem Cell Institute of University of Connecticut Health Center. He has completed his postdoctoral research in 2007 from Department of Medicine, University of Connecticut Health Center before which he attained his doctoral degree from Department of Microbiology of Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI) located at Lucknow, India in 2001.

Research Interest

His research work is aimed at developing an effective immune based cancer therapy. Since most human tumor antigens identified are "self-antigens", and most human tumors are MHC class I positive, but MHC class II negative, the generation of a potent anti-tumor immune response faces many inherent constraints. Among these include, an extremely low precursor frequency of antitumor T cells in most cancer patients, and the lack of an effective method to engage CD4 T cells in tumor immunity, especially in an antigen specific manner. They have developed multiple approach to effectively address these limitation, utilizing the human melanoma associated antigens as model tumor antigens. He have published his findings in prominent peer-review journals and research work has earned him several awards at international cancer immunotherapy meetings. In addition to his work on human melanoma, ongoing research efforts in his laboratory are aimed at extending his expertise to the human breast cancer model and also to utilize the human pluripotent stem cells [hPS, i.e. human embryonic stem cells (hES) and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS)] for developing patient specific cancer immunotherapy approaches through TCR engineering approach.