Kennady Bullock, PhD

I received my PhD from Vanderbilt University under the mentorship of Dr. Ann Richmond. My dissertation focused on developing combinations of targeted therapies and chemotherapies to make triple-negative breast tumors more responsive to immune checkpoint inhibitors. I'm currently a post-doc in Dr. Patrick Hwu's lab where I'm studying therapeutic vaccines for the treatment of various solid tumors, with a focus on gynecological malignancies. I'm particularly interested in identifying and targeting human endogenous retroviral elements (HERVs)  as tumor antigens. HERVs are genomic remnants of ancient viral infections that show little to no expression in normal, healthy adult tissue, but can be re-expressed in some tumors. The tumor specific expression patterns of some HERVs make them good candidate targets of therapeutic vaccines or other immunotherapy strategies.