Riley Mullins
Program: Immunology
Current advisor: Sid Puram, MD, PhD
Undergraduate university: Ohio State University-Columbus
Research summary
I work in Dr. Sid Puram’s lab studying the interactions between cancer and immune cells in head and neck cancer. The immune system should be able to recognize a cancerous cell and appropriately eliminate it. However, cancer cells can send signals to immune cells that make the immune response against a tumor dysfunctional. Cancer immunotherapy is designed to restore immune cell function against a tumor, leading to tumor elimination. While cancer immunotherapy treatments are successful in some patients with solid cancers, most patients do not significantly benefit from them. In my project, I focus on the crosstalk between immune cells and a population of malignant cells with a propensity to metastasize. I study this crosstalk by implementing single cell sequencing of primary head and neck cancer patient samples to characterize gene expression in individual cancer and immune cells within a tumor. Based on the patterns of gene expression in patients’ tumors, I investigate the molecular mediators of the immune-cancer crosstalk that may contribute to tumor growth, metastasis, and immune cell dysfunction.
Graduate publications
Barrett TF, Patel B, Khan SM, Mullins RDZ, Yim AKY, Pugazenthi S, Mahlokozera T, Zipfel GJ, Herzog JA, Chicoine MR, Wick CC, Durakovic N, Osbun JW, Shew M, Sweeney AD, Patel AJ, Buchman CA, Petti AA, Puram SV, Kim AH. 2024 Single-cell multi-omic analysis of the vestibular schwannoma ecosystem uncovers a nerve injury-like state. Nat Commun, 15(1):478.
Mullins RDZ, Pal A, Barrett TF, Heft Neal ME, Puram SV. 2022 Epithelial-Mesenchymal Plasticity in Tumor Immune Evasion. Cancer Res, 82(13):2329-43.
Qi Z, Liu Y, Mints M, Mullins R, Sample R, Law T, Barrett T, Mazul AL, Jackson RS, Kang SY, Pipkorn P, Parikh AS, Tirosh I, Dougherty J, Puram SV. 2021 Single-Cell Deconvolution of Head and Neck Squamous Cell Carcinoma. Cancers (Basel), 13(612):1230.