Jennifer Wargo

Dr. Wargo’s career commitment is to advance the understanding and treatment of disease through science. In her career, she has focused on T cell biology and understanding the immune response in melanoma and other cancers. Recently, she has led critical studies to better understand the effects of BRAF inhibition and immune checkpoint blockade in response and resistance in melanoma. Dr. Wargo plays a major role in MD Anderson’s Melanoma Moonshot program and is central in analyzing a unique set of serial tumor biopsies and blood samples from patients enrolled on clinical trials for targeted therapy and immunotherapies. Her major projects study strategies of combining targeted therapy and immunotherapy in melanoma, tumor heterogeneity in synchronous melanoma metastases, and the microbiome’s effects on response and resistance to therapy. Working with Dr. Wargo would expose students to a wide array of techniques spanning both immunology, genomics and proteomics, including flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry, and various molecular analyses. Tutorial students could, for one example, spend a rotation examining how the bacteria inside a person’s intestines affects their immune system’s response to melanoma, by conducting flow cytometry on tumor digests and comparing analyses of their microbiome makeup.