Many cancers develop slowly over years, passing through pre-malignant stages where early immune responses may determine whether disease is contained or progresses to invasive cancer. Oral epithelial dysplasia (OED) is one such pre-malignant condition, yet clinicians currently have no reliable way to predict which lesions will transform into oral squamous cell carcinoma. Dr. Jingya Qiu is working to clarify how immune surveillance operates—and ultimately fails—during this early window of disease. Her recent work has shown that a specialized population of CXCL13⁺ CD8⁺ T cells is strongly enriched in OED lesions that later progress to cancer, suggesting that antigen-specific but functionally constrained T cell responses emerge long before tumors become invasive.
Dr. Qiu’s research shows that these CXCL13⁺ CD8⁺ T cells sit within conserved “immune hubs” composed of dysplastic epithelial, myeloid, and stromal cells that exchange immune-modulating signals. As OED evolves, these hubs undergo spatial and molecular remodeling linked to immune escape and malignant transformation. Building on this discovery, she will apply advanced spatial transcriptomics, digital pathology, and computer vision to map how immune cell states change over time in a unique longitudinal collection of OED and oral cancer samples. She will also develop deep learning models to detect prognostic immune features from routine pathology images and investigate whether circulating immune signatures can offer a non-invasive way to monitor risk. Finally, she will use computational perturbation approaches to identify microenvironmental factors capable of restoring productive CD8⁺ T cell responses in high-risk lesions.
Dr. Qiu brings extensive experience in cancer immunotherapy and multimodal genomics, including influential work showing how chronic inflammation imprints lasting, resistance-associated epigenetic states—a process known as inflammatory memory. By defining how immune surveillance unfolds in pre-malignancy and pinpointing when and why it breaks down, her work aims to deliver clinically actionable biomarkers and reveal new opportunities for immune-based early intervention—providing a path to detect and intercept cancer before it begins.
Sponsor
Matthew Spitzer, PhD (Mentor); Karin Pelka, PhD (Co-Mentor)
Projects and Grants
Defining, Monitoring, And Intercepting Pre-Malignant Immune Hubs
