New Faculty

Dr. Nathan Singh joins the Department of Medicine

Dr. Nathan Singh has joined the Department of Medicine as an assistant professor on the investigator track in the Division of Oncology, Section of Stem Cell Biology. He comes to Wash U from the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed a combined MD/Masters of Science in Translational research program, during which he spent two years in the laboratory of Dr. Stephan Grupp. After medical school, he did clinical training in internal medicine, hematology and oncology, with focused training in cellular therapy and the management of leukemia. Following clinical training, Nathan did his fellowship research with Dr. Carl June, studying mechanisms driving failure of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies. As part of the Penn Center for Cellular Immunotherapies group for over 10 years, he has expertise in all aspects of cell therapy research and clinical practice. Nathan will extend his work in the June Lab here at Wash U, where his independent laboratory will investigate how these novel receptors drive the development of T cell dysfunction. Despite promising early results, long-term follow-up has now revealed that nearly half of patients treated with CAR T cells for hematologic cancers will not experience long-term remissions. Using a variety of techniques in cell lines and primary patient samples, the Singh Lab aims to understand how interactions between engineered T cells and blood cancer cells in some cases lead to disease cure, and in others to therapeutic failure. The broad goals of the lab are to elucidate the biological principles governing the activity of these synthetic receptors and use these as a blueprint to design the next-generation of “intelligent” cellular therapies. In addition to his research, Nathan will attend on the inpatient cellular therapy and hematopoietic cell transplantation service. As a physician-scientist focused on cellular therapies, Nathan is very interested in mentoring graduate and medical students, as well as post-doctoral and physician fellows in translational immunology and immunotherapy for cancer.