Dr. Storkus has published over 225 refereed publications, proceedings, invited papers, reviews, and book chapters. He is active in the mentoring of graduate and doctoral students.
My research group focuses on the study of tumor immunobiology and in designing immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer based on results gained in translational murine models and human in vitro studies. Treatment modalities have included dendritic cell (DC)-based vaccines, cytokine gene-modified DC injected directly into tumor lesions and combinational approaches integrating agents that modulate tumor cell immune recognition (i.e. HSP90 inhibitors) or alter the balance or Type-1 versus regulatory immunity in the tumor microenvironment (i.e. TKI). Most recently, we have discovered that immune targeting of the tumor-associated vasculature occurs naturally as a consequence of effective immunotherapy (via DC1-based cross-priming of T cells), and that vaccines based on tumor-associated blood antigens (TBVA) can promote tumor regression even in cases where cancer cells cannot be directly recognized by the protective CD8+ immune system. We have also recently determined that anti-angiogenic agents such as the TKIs sunitinib, axitinib and dasatinib all promote tumor vascular normalization and the improved delivery of anti-TBVA T cells into the tumor microenvironment (TME), allowing for improve anti-tumor efficacy. This has most recently resulted in the development of our NIH-supported clinical trial UPCI 12-048 “A Randomized Phase II Pilot Study of Type I-Polarized Autologous Dendritic Cell Vaccines Incorporating Tumor Blood Vessel Antigen (TBVA)-Derived Peptides in Combination with Dasatinib in Patients with Metastatic Melanoma”.