Sydney Lu, MD, PhD

Sydney X. Lu, MD, PhD, is a hematologist and medical oncologist in the Division of Hematology, Department of Medicine, studying novel therapeutics for challenging cancers.

Dr. Lu’s research career started with graduate studies in the laboratory of Marcel van den Brink, MD, PhD, at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), studying the biology of pathologic donor T cells during graft-versus-fhost-disease and beneficial T cells mediating graft-versus-tumor effects after allogeneic bone marrow transplant, as well as the role of the thymus in regenerating healthy and protective donor-derived T cells post-transplant.

The direct relevance of these cellular therapies and their immediate translational applicability to patients inspired him to attend medical school at Stanford and further training in hematology and medical oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering. There, as a fellow and junior faculty member, he studied disordered RNA splicing in cancer in the laboratory of Omar Abdel-Wahab, MD, with the goal of developing novel drugs targeting RNA splicing. This work has led to observations that targeted degradation of the RNA binding protein RBM39 may be a feasible therapeutic for the treatment of myeloid cancers bearing RNA splicing factor mutations and that pharmacologic RNA splicing inhibition can generate MHC I-presented peptide neoantigens which are exploitable for immunotherapy in model systems.

As a 2020 Parker Bridge Fellow, Dr. Lu was additionally co-mentored by Jedd D. Wolchok, MD, PhD. Together, they explored the combination of checkpoint immunotherapy with drugs that modulate RNA splicing, with the hypothesis that therapeutic modulation of RNA biology can render tumor cells more immunogenic, thus enhancing checkpoint immunotherapy.