Dr. Begonya Comin-Anduix’s research focuses on two areas: optimizing immune monitoring techniques and studying approaches to enhance the T-cell responses to human metastatic melanoma.

Comin-Anduix studies the optimization, development, and validation of quantitative immune monitoring methods at a single cell level. Existing available methods require large samples, which are difficult to acquire from melanoma patients. Therefore, she collaborates with engineers from the California Institute of Technology to microscale quantitative immune monitoring methods optimized in her research.

Tumor infiltrating lymphocytes (TIL) may be the key for improving immunotherapy in melanoma patients. Previous work of Comin-Anduix and colleagues shows that antigen-specific cytotoxic T-lymphocytes are more abundant in regressing tumors than in progressing lesions and peripheral blood of melanoma patients. Unpublished results of her research show that lymphocytes found in the tumor are phenotypically different from those found in peripheral blood. Thus, the other focus area of her laboratory characterizes and optimizes TILs to improve T-cell response against melanoma.